One Bloody Night (BLDNIGHT.WAD)

Erik Alm is largely regarded as the WADfather of the Doom community's direction in combat due to his double-shot of the much loved Scythe and then, later, Scythe II. The third episode of Scythe generally comes as a thunderclap to folks who love its shorter, "cute" levels, but anyone familiar with Alm's work could see it coming from a mile away. Alm's fondness for both short, warm-up type levels as well as bone-crushing challenge encounters is evident in his contributions to Sam Woodman's ONEWEEK and it's similarly mirrored here, in One Bloody Night. This is a nine-level episode for vanilla Doom II that replaces MAP01-MAP09, released in the middle of 2002.

One Bloody Night doesn't have a story. Instead, it tells a tale of carnage wrought by one intrepid marine. You're clearing out Hellspawn, beginning in an abandoned, dilapidated base; following the trail of monsters through sewage tunnels; clearing out a major fortification; travelling to a nearby infested city including both an industrial warehouse as well as a maze-like collection of alleyways; and eventually the deeper reaches of what is either Hell or a Hellish, warping corruption, including overtures toward Doom II's "The Spirit World" (or, more pointedly, TNT: Evilution's "Heck" (MAP28)) as well as "The Living End". All of this occurs under a gorgeous night sky, courtesy of Fredrik Johannson of Vrack 2 fame.

The development story of BLDNIGHT is that it began life as a megaWAD-in-progress between Erik Alm, Fredrik Johansson, and Nick "NiGHTMaRe" Baker. Alm had built 11 levels but his compatriots had only built one and two, respectively, with Erik doubtful as to whether Fredrik would quickly make 10 more. So as not to lose personal momentum, Erik scrapped one level (gasp!), donated another (to where??), and then published the remaining nine. I'm interested as to where Baker's and Johansson's levels ended up. NiGHTMaRe said that he would be publishing his before too long in the Newstuff thread discussing One Bloody Night. (Edit 04/08/25: Apparently Baker's two levels ended up published as Wasted 1: Industrial Zone and Wasted 2: The Crusher.) I'm also curious as to where Alm's other level ended up. End Game? Plutonia 2? Apparently Erik was also intending to flesh the episode out into a full megaWAD. Looking at his Page of Doom, he had four levels complete for it: "Hell Froze Over", "Violence", "Brimstone", and "Diabolic Keep".

It seems then that the primary reason that BLDNIGHT is paced like a small megaWAD is because, well, these were intended to be entries in a full one. This isn't Scythe Jr., though. The first of these levels, "The Abandoned Base" (MAP01), is the only map that comes close to the idea of small-scale low-key combat exemplified in Scythe's early levels. "Stream of Death" (MAP02) and "Dream World" (MAP06) are of a kind of similar size but are a sort of punchy that seems to, I dunno, better exemplify Plutonia in MAP02's case and something more like Malcolm Sailor's moody claustrophobia in MAP06.

As a whole, One Bloody Night's gameplay feels like an attempt to marry the knockabout style of the Casalis with Hell Revealed's scale. Given that this is the remains of Alm's work with Johansson and Baker, I don't know how much of this is a product of whatever the specs of the project were versus Alm's own gameplay predilections. My memories of Scythe are now ten years old but it feels like it was more committed to Demonfear a la Alm as a concept, at least across the first two episodes, with Alm showing more of his HR / speedrunner hand in its third. And, well, Erik has consistently shown a strong preference for the sort of enormous scale of Hell Revealed's encounters since his debut in One Week. Its "Castle" (MAP08) and especially "The 24 Cyber Spirits" (MAP11) have a sort of dwarfing vastness to their encounters that make the player feel so small among the forces of Hell...and thus so much more mighty. 

One Bloody Night has this scale at points but the general thrust of its encounters feels more intimate. Take "Suburbs" (MAP05), for example. It isn't Alm's favorite of the nine retained levels ("this map sucks", he declares in the .TXT) but it's perfectly functional and pretty fun once you get beyond the cookie-cutter "houses". I got a Hell Revealed II "Playground" (MAP32) vibe while I was playing it and now that I'm thinking about it it vaguely reminds me of Kama Sutra's city maps with its yard fights. Granted, part of KSUTRA's charm is how far Vojta and Razak pushed vanilla in an attempt to evoke some of that BUILD and post-Doom realism. "Suburbs" makes very little effort to look pretty beyond I guess those very pretty lampposts.

"Cave of Hades" (MAP07) is another one, the level that most overtly suggests to me the influence of the Casalis in its "Heck"-esque opening area and "Spirit World" homage cave but which looks a bit farther with encounter setups like the choir of revenants backing the Spiderdemon and foreshadowing modern puzzle-style fights with the teleporting arch-viles-go-round. "Living Dead" (MAP08) is a startling community secret, a "Living End" pastiche with upscaled fights like the absolutely ridiculous amount of cacodemons in the outdoor area and the double-sided revenant bleachers just south of the map's center.

I know that I'm looking at the evolution of "modern" combat stylings here with One Bloody Night. It feels like it points the way toward "newschool" much more than Scythe as a whole. In this way it's an interesting companion piece to 2001's Alien Vendetta, which to my ailing memory smacks more of a roided-up Memento Mori II or Requiem given its varied authors, not to downplay Johnsen's (and others') Hell Revealed epics like the stately "Dark Dome" (MAP26). AV isn't afraid of excess, either, as evidenced in levels like the mastadonic "Demonic Hordes" (MAP25). I think that it's the relatively smaller scale of BLDNIGHT, when combined with Alm's lock-in fights, that has me thinking ahead to 2011 and beyond.

The lock-in fights aren't on the same level of craziness as I've played but if my memory of player commentary serves me correctly then this is something that Alm would go on to further develop with the favored child, Scythe II. For some reason the phrase "Scythe-style death arenas" with regards to Unholy Realms sticks out in my mind. That's basically what you have, here, but bite-sized: sink or swim no retreat battles. They can be as simple as the Hell knight / arch-vile pairing in "Warehouse" (MAP04) or a bit bigger with the slightly larger "Dead Simple" crowd with area-denial-vile in the crate maze portion of the same level. In "Ashes to Ashes" (MAP09), the boss shooter finale, its east and west wings are lock-in gauntlets that you must pass through in order to reach the rocket platform, and which are restocked via a large arch-vile holding pen.

Make no mistake, though. One Bloody Night's levels don't have the sort of gameplay flow that you may be looking for from its modern-day descendants. The player has quite a bit of freedom to wander into these pitfalls as well as others, oftentimes with the ability to run, though in the case of situations like the massive outdoor cacodemon cloud of "Living Dead" this may make the situation more complicated. If you're playing these maps from scratch then you will have to indulge in some trial and error as you figure out a route that works for you. In the case of something like MAP08, this may involve bouncing between the level's two major legs. Things will be considerably simpler if you are playing with carryovers as you won't have to worry about missing out on, say, a plasma gun pickup, or fighting your way to a rocket launcher.

Alm was a vanguard in scaling down the craziness of Hell Revealed and synthesizing something that also incorporated smaller-size firefights that feel just as deadly at times, more along the lines of Malcolm Sailor's CHORD series but without the baggage of overtuned health / armor balance. I personally had a lot of fun with BLDNIGHT but it's a tough mapset to recommend to the average player both then and now. I'm not sure who its target audience would be today given how high the bar has been raised with combat in the wake of authors like Ribbiks, both in combat AND the sort of macrotecture and aesthetics enabled with limit-removing / Boom ports as evidenced by the paradigm shift following Deus Vult. Could this be comfort food for burned-out slaughterhounds? Perhaps. If you have any sort of leanings toward Hell Revealed-style combat played out on a sort of smaller scale with a healthy dose of lower-stakes incidental combat and you HAVEN'T played One Bloody Night, then you really ought to.

ONE BLOODY NIGHT

by Erik Alm

The Abandoned Base

MAP01

Kicking things off with a hella cute techbase! This is a more or less flat but shiny gray installation filled with zombies and imps and a few cacodemons. And maybe one closet full of lost souls. It's a pretty easy map with a CYOA moment where you can either grab the red key or the combat shotgun first. (Psst! Get the SSG!) I think that the hairiest fight in the level will end up being the outdoor area, but for some reason my shotgun guy platforms didn't shoot much before I blasted them.

MAP02

Stream of Death

Killing demons in the sewers! This tunnel trek gets pretty bloody and pretty fun. There's a deliberate spot for a speedrunning skip in the arch-vile pillar room to the southwest, allowing you to jump to the outdoor leg early on. As a progenitor of Scythe, it's got a few fun lock-in sawtooth fights like the Barons in the nukage. I think that I had the most fun with the outdoor leg, though, with plenty of rocket spitting and combat shotgun dancing with revenants. The atmospheric lighting adds a lot of subtle beauty to this grimy locale.

Main Base

MAP03

This is a fun and furious installation with a "Pit"-style opener and a neat outdoor sandbox where you can acquire the rocket launcher, plasma gun, and BFG, as well as access a difficult (but not impossible!) to reach timed door that is host to a significant monster ambush, the reward being a megasphere. The level is just plain fun to explore and includes a grimy tile maze staffed with revenants that you can teleport into after grabbing the red key as well as a final Cyberdemon who is supported by earthbound chaingunner bunkers. A fine place to carpet a location with BFG blasts if I ever saw one. There are plenty of supplies, so just take your time and enjoy yourself. Otherwise you might find yourself, uh, cut off by a dual wave of cacodemons and spectres.

MAP04

Warehouse

The south end of this level is a "Containment Area"-style warehouse, one of which is considerably more dangerous than the other, but it's all mostly crate storage in one form or another with a bit of what feels like Alm's Europa aesthetic for the east wing and some of the connective tissue. Both halves of the southern kingdom are worth exploring for their keys and powerups, though you're only required to grab the yellow one. If you don't get the blue, though, you'll miss out on a lock-in style encounter as well as all the tasty items locked behind the blue key door. That's at least a plasma gun and, if you can sort out the platforming, a blue armor and an invul sphere as well, all of which greatly simplify the dark finale with the end-of-level Cyberdemon. "Warehouse" is a bit more rich in unique fights compared to main base. Some of them, like the arch-vile / Hell knight wing, are simple but effective in their economy of monsters and the battleground. Others are just corridors of death, like the red key ambush, which could turn ugly if you don't have enough rockets for the crowd's sole arch-vile. I loved the goofy arch-vile among the chaingunner encampment given that you're meant to turn it into a ridiculous infighting crossfire with the blur sphere. Really, troublesome arch-vile placement is a big theme of this map's biggest encounters. The west warehouse has one hiding behind a mancubus meat wall while the lock-in with the blue key has one keeping you penned in a tight spot while the mancubi and arachnotrons teleport in.

Suburbs

MAP05

Settling more into slaughter-type encounters with this window-walled abstraction. The opening area might throw you off with its sequential buildings, each one escalating in its monster staffing. Just look at that SSG at the end of the road, though! Sure, when you grab it you wake up a Cyberdemon, but just look at that plasma gun at the end of the road! Sure, when you grab it you open up dual revenant monster closets, but they're the chocolate to the Cyberdemon peanut butter. Most of the time my Cybie survived the brawl but I had at least one, probably where he got surrounded, where the revenants handily outclassed him. The dual buildings in the eastern yard have a sort of HR "Resistance is Futile" / AV "No Guts No Glory" / HR2 "Playground" vibe, like they'd fit in as a structure in one of those big, high bodycount outdoor levels, but it also has the same sort of pacing, minus an initial monster carpet. Each side has a token guarding force; there's a huge surplus of cacodemons in the north annex; and the inside of each building has a very big and VERY different surprise. Protip: Get the BFG first. The last major challenge has something like three Cyberdemons teleporting around multiple tiers of an outdoor area, giving me flashbacks to Super MAYhem 17's MAP15 (or is it flash-forwards when the PWAD came out fifteen years later?). I tried to figure out a cute way to do Cyberdemon BFG bumps but it really feels like the best / safest way of handling the terrible trio is to just BFG blast them from the ground floor when they're at the bottom step. This more easygoing type of slaughter gameplay is something that I can get behind. I don't know how the rest of BLDNIGHT's combat is going to ramp up--I've read horrible things about MAP09--but it hasn't been bad so far.

MAP06

Dream World

Shifting gears for a sort of Hellish, Sailor-ish jaunt through a marble Hell whose façade is falling apart into the inferno. It's a cool (and fun) sort of cinematic map as openings into red rock Hell will release enemies into previously explored areas--usually imps--and its has some fun, small-scale lock-in fights like the HR-like Hell knight chamber right before the BFG. The most important piece of advice I can give you is, don't miss the plasma gun in the Cyberdemon cave!

Cave of Hades

MAP07

Whoa there! Here's a tough one, a romp through the spirit world as informed by TNT: Evilution's "Heck" (MAP28), judging by the opening area. The opening sends you either toward the relative sanity of imp and zombie monster masses, or between a pair of inverted crosses and into a big "Spirit World"-esque cave. I sort of gravitated toward the BFG pickup first because it seemed tailor-made for infighting exploitation given the placement of the revenants. You'll also exit the cave with a megasphere, the two things together giving you a significant leg up on the eastern wing. The eastern area has easygoing wholesale monster slaughter with a few spicy peppers thrown in. The rocket launcher pickup chamber has an entire semicircle worth of chaingunner coverage. I did this with the BFG at great personal cost. There is a nearby fairly obvious secret containing a blur sphere; use that instead. I really like the look of the "Courtyard" bloody ember, uh, fieriducts that lead to the Cyberdemon / arch-vile chamber at the level's northernmost point. There are a few chunky teleport ambushes that drop a ton of new meat into the "Heck" catwalk starting area. These teleport ambushes don't feel particularly inspired, but the one following the arch-vile teleport-go-round is pretty fun since you are sent in with an invul sphere.

MAP08

Living Dead

Is this a "Post-Mortem" homage? Oh, sweet! This is an Alm-ified "Living End" rework. It's a wicked cool level with some awesome vanilla macrotecture. The base idea of Romero's layout is still there but most of the particulars have changed. One of the most important bits is an alternate route that heads counter-clockwise from the starting area, required in order to snag the blue skull key and terminating in a basic but cool setup involving double-sided revenant bleachers. There's a sort of back-and-forth between the two sides that the level encourages. The first major room in the alternate route is GLOAMING with pain elementals in a sneaky setup. The layout can allow the lost soul generation to get crazy out of hand. You won't want to try to tackle all of this with the base kit, so it's convenient that a combat shotgun is nestled in a granite structure. It's worth bouncing back from there to the marble imp mega platform chamber as it's the beeline to the rocket launcher pickup. This will make some of the encounters, like the lock-in with the arch-vile and Hell nobles, much smoother. Alm packed quite a few memorable fights into this map. One of the biggest is the ENORMOUS cacodemon assault in the level's outdoor segment, occupying the northwest portion. It really just boils down to rocket launcher suppression fire and, once it's gone on long enough, combat shotgun cleanup, but it's a memorably massive cloud of cacos. Maybe the dirtiest fight of the whole bunch is the front door of the temple, as it leaves you in a mancubus crossfire with two arch-vile stations and a host of imps that are bunched up and ready to jack you up. I appreciate this as a sort of dirty "Living End" on steroids with even grander visuals and a taste--though not the full scale--of ONEWEEK's "The 24 Cyber Spirits" (MAP11), as was "Cave of Hades" plying the "Spirit World" / "Heck" vibe.

Ashes to Ashes

MAP09

A boss shooter! When you take the teleporter, you get your choice of clockwise or counter-clockwise to make it to the rocket platform. Each station pits you against a series of three fights and you can't move on without hitting a switch that will probably be tough to flip without killing the guardians... apart from the solo Cyberdemon. A lot of this is easily solved with BFG spam, but one fight--the revenant cave--might be a bit better leading off with the rocket launcher. I can't imagine trying to do this in a single segment. The eastern challenge legs aren't that bad but if you mess up your timing on the rocket then you have to run all the way back through to get another shot. I only needed two direct hits, but the beasties are slowly but surely carpeting the main playing area. Oh, and SCREW that omega arch-vile closet behind the rocket platform!!! That thing can go straight to Hell. There's, like, 33 of those fuckers in there.

THIS EPISODE IS

A FESTIVAL OF FIGHTS

INSTEAD OF THIRTY-TWO LEVELS WE GET

ONE BLOODY NIGHT