PAZUZU
WINGS OF POSSESSION
by T. Elliot Cannon
aka "Myscha the Sled Dog"
T. Elliot Cannon has a brief but promising Doom II authorship that was cut down in its prime by being hired to work on Unreal at the recommendation of John Anderson of Master Levels For Doom II fame. He released the raw, cramped, and switch-crazy Iditarod; the charming architectural delight of Odyssey; and then published the lone but formidable Diabolos, all three PWADs being uploaded to /idgames in 1996. His last known single-player idtech1 creation was this: Pazuzu (Wings of Possession), a MAP01 replacement for Doom II, similarly released in 1996, about a month after he interred the rest of his known single-player maps.
The .TXT for this map claims that Diabolos was the "preface for Pazuzu", indicating that Cannon considered these levels to be in something of a series. Diabolos didn't have a story to go along with it but here the player is investigating a series of structures built to worship the Mesopotamian deity, known best perhaps in pop culture for being the demon who possesses Regan in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Your mission is to recover three skulls full of mystic power (one blue, one red, and one yellow...?), I think drawing more on the subsequent Exorcist films. Presumably the theft of the skulls will tip the balance in Good's favor, either by increasing the cosmic energies warring against Evil or by removing some of Pazuzu's.
Pazuzu and Diabolos do indeed have some similarities. These two levels are stylistically contiguous in the same way that the design of the maps bundled together on Odyssey are or how generally unified the levels of Iditarod feel. I imagine that, had he not been hired by Epic, that he might have made more in the same strain. Barring, of course, the fact that he had also committed his talents to The Talosian Incident (to which Bye believed he gave the first draft of Unreal's plot), Team TNT (submitting deathmatch levels for Bloodlands and Grievance), and had his own passion project: CHRONOS--Man's Last Breath, which would have had a structure eerily similar to Scythe II in its proposed minisodes.
The aesthetic that Cannon plies in this level is architecturally complex, features painstaking texture alignment, and has rooms that are both sensibly themed while also flowing into each other logically. It's mostly brick and metal but there's a green marble annex for you to fight your way through as well as an underground cavern rendered in that igneous-like black rock texture. The starting areas of these two maps are similar in that both of them begin with you on the ledge of a pit with the exit door (in environmental storytelling, presumably the way you came in from) nearby. You can't proceed without first descending to a lower tier with no idea of what sort of malefic entities lie ahead.
The opening segment of the two levels is decidedly different, however. In Diabolos, you step into a hub room which gradually opens up into the other three intercardinal directions. It's staffed by imps but it's a relatively relaxed shotgun shoot to start with. Pazuzu has more of a survival horror feel. The shotgun is on a pedestal that resembles a lemniscate: visible from the start but not initially accessible. You immediately awake a demon and it's your prerogative to slay it in the pit with the pistol or try to surge forward. The trigger that eventually makes the shotgun accessible isn't immediately apparent, which might turn you off the level entirely when the first Hell knight is encountered.
The combat is conventionally Cannon, with a healthy mix of small, cramped ambushes as well as larger rooms with entrenched opposition that are dangerous to just spring into. The underground cave with its imps on the floor, hitscanners on the ledge, and revenants guarding the alcove was one rough spot for me. The metal courtyard in the level's northwest part was the other. TEC has a few teleport ambushes, mostly surprises from Hell nobles, but while surprising, they're not all that difficult once you've been checked into the tactical playstyle that Cannon's action seems to favor. I was surprised at the theming of the marble shrine with the Diabolos-esque keygrab from behind. It has TONS of demons for a feel-good combat shotgun marathon.
On paper, Pazuzu's layout is straightforward. There are no major branching paths, as was the case with Diabolos; Cannon's level design is basically a linear chain of rooms that you begin in the middle of and then slosh back and forth as you move east and westward. This sounds much simpler than it actually is, considering how much of the author's design language consists of timed switches and opaque triggers. The cavern room is distilled Cannon as it also requires leaping over an admittedly shallow stream in order to meet some of its timed triggers. Otherwise, well, it's hard to get totally lost in a layout as simple as this. Confused, maybe, but not for long.
It's a great-looking mapset, same as Diabolos. TEC's level design shines with core parts of its detailing and geometry consisting of support structures like columns as well as, in a few areas, what appear to be cement girders. There isn't a single area that doesn't look simply cool but I really enjoyed the step sequence from the nukage pit to the northwest metal room and the marble shrine to the southeast looks awesome as well. I'm not sure why, exactly, but when I played these last two entries from Cannon's canon I thought of Grzegorz Werner's A Hidden Mountain Factory. TEC's non-Iditarod works focus on presenting realistic spaces, specifically with regards to whether they make sense from an architect's point of view. Werner's realistic spaces come from how the aqueducts / conduit run through the walls of the level, evoking realism more through an apparent infrastructure than absolute architecture. TEC has a bit of that going on in Diabolos, with his emphasis on how water (and blood) make their way through the northeast section of the map.
I'm glad that TEC was able to leverage his experience with Doom II into a job at Epic but I can't help but wonder what The Talosian Incident would have turned out like with him fielding his own portion of maps, turning it into a Bye / Sailor / Cannon showcase. Similarly, the idea of Chronos--sort of an extended Odyssey but with custom textures to better ground its theming and its three-to-five level minisodes--sounds incredible. Based on what we have, it's possible that he could have ended up making more levels with the classic, '96-core designs of Diabolos and Pazuzu, which I would have relished. Such is Doom, though. If you're a fan of the '96 era and you haven't played this, then what are you waiting for? Custom textures? Understandable, but unlikely. Just do yourself a favor and download Pazuzu today.
"WITH MY LAST BREATH,
I CURSE ZOIDBERG!"
What did i ever do to you?
ReplyDelete