Episode 2 takes a detour from Silent Hill In The Woods With Eyes and drives straight into the occult techno-horror industrial zone. The backdrops are massive military processing facilities with a haunting purpose, the enemies you face will be more military and crazy in nature, and common sense starts taking more of a backseat.
Things start off with
E2M1, The Grainery, which is this flat rectangular field with a fortress on top of the wall right on the other side of the level. Normally I would have called this lazy, but what makes this setup not a pushover like most levels prior to this one is that there's a massive stream of fireballs coming at you from the fortress battlements, like you're being bombarded with artillery and have to be mindful of it at all times despite the huge freedom of movement the open space grants you. Since this is the first level of the episode, even non-IM players won't have any long-range weapons to safely deal with all the enemies on the battlements, as the only weapons you can find at this point are a single regular shotgun and some pistols. There's a secret Riveter right near the start to throw you a bone against those sniping fucks across the yard, but even then you want to get closer to danger before you can line up a good shot. On top of that you have Soldiers teleporting in on the field to make your life even less straightforward and to add more vectors of attack to the mix.
This level is where the Soldier enemies start appearing for real. Technically they've been introduced back at the very end of E1M8 and then used loosely in E1M9, but this is where they become a common enemy. The Soldiers are to the Wizards what the Zombie Sergeants are to Imps. Soldiers only take only one regular shotgun shot to kill as opposed to the Wizard's two, so they often appear in larger groups to compensate. On the flipside their attacks are generally deadlier than that of a Wizard's fireball because of their higher projectile speed and them firing their guns in a burst of three, so you naturally find yourself prioritizing them more. They are kind of similar to the Deers, but work better as a omnipresent grunt-type enemy because their hitboxes aren't as deceptive. I also imagine having military facility levels be populated largely by evil deer instead of armed soldiers raises some questions. The Soldier's death animation is also cooler than that of the Wizards. The Wizards just fly backwards on death, Soldiers always do a mid-air spin when killed. If you're going to die, you should do it with style.
The other new enemy type that gets introduced this episode is the Welder, bulky creeps wearing gray welding suits who can fire constant streams of fireballs at you, much like Doom 2's Arachnotrons. They also explode shortly after death when not immediately gibbed, making them work like mobile explosive barrels when surrounded by other weak enemies like Soldiers.
On paper, Welders fit right in the role of long-range artillery and exist to create a stream of bullets you'd have to cross through. Their high fire rate makes them much more suitable at long-range sniping than groups of Wizards and quite frankly I wish they would have been introduced much earlier. If you're going to have your levels be all open and flat, you might as well fill the open fields with a curtain of bullets, which where the Welders can come in.
At the same time, I think this is where Welders fall flat. The largest source of wasted potential is that they won't fire at you non-stop as long as you are in their sights (like an Arachnotron from Doom or the aforementioned M2 Enforcer) and instead will take regular breaks from firing. This contradicts the purpose of having an enemy shoot a constant stream of projectiles you'll have to dodge by either weaving through a gap or breaking line of sight, since you can just wait or keep strafing until they stop firing. The threat an enemy like this would pose is that by firing a continuous stream of bullets they'd force you to strafe into a wall until you'd run out of space, at which point you'd either have to risk crossing the stream by micrododging (or in DUSK's case, sliding) or by breaking line of sight. So if you don't want to risk either, the natural approach would have been to prioritize them. Of course this element of constricting your space flat out does not work if the Welder/Arachnotron/Enforcer is placed in a position where you can just keep moving around them in a circle (as has been mentioned before with The Experiments in E1M10). While the pause in their bulletstorm largely contradicts the Welder's role already, its projectile speed is also too slow for it to pose a serious threat on longer ranges, so even in that regard the Welder doesn't suit its role.
To go back to the level, you can enter the fortress using an underground passage,
or through a secret which teleports you smack dab in the middle of all these enemies in the fortress (as a kind of trade-off for skipping the underground passage and the enemies inside). The layout of the fortress can be best described as a playground; being populated with several buildings and towers with enemies on them, and several jump pads on the floor to allow you to get on these buildings easier. Sadly the encounter space is both too open and sparsely populated, so it's
too easy to hide behind one of the structures and bottleneck the enemies into coming towards you.
After crossing through this space for a second time after finding the yellow key, it's repopulated with enemies, but the placement this time around is more effective. Now you have actual vertical variation in enemy placement, and the enemy amount is more plentiful this time around to take better advantage of the large combat space. While the bottlenecking/popamole playstyle will still work for this encounter, it at least offers a more engaging challenge if you decide to pretend you can't and play aggressively instead now that you have multiple attack vectors to consider with multiple enemies being placed on the ground AND high up (or even bouncing up and down on a jump pad).
The only enemy types used for this encounter are the Welder and Soldier. From mid-range both enemies are functionally identical, but the combination of the two gels really well. The reason being that both can be dispatched in one shot; the Soldier with a single normal shotgun blast, and the Welder with a single HR round. What you get is a situation where you're constantly switching between the shotguns and the HR, landing constant single-hit kills between the two weapons with maximum efficiency. It's satisfying to master the controls to a point where you can quickly switch between weapons and land a single pinpoint shot on each enemy, which is best exemplified with the Soldier/Welder combo.
Following onwards you might notice that one of the towers has a more greenish tint (though it's not really obvious), and after entering find that it leads into a tunnel which drops you into a silo, which conveniently contains the yellow key you needed. Not so convenient is that there's no way up. If you look around, you might notice a patch of ground with stars emanating from it. Looking at it reveals an interaction prompt to dig up the ground, revealing the "Climbing Thing" power-up underneath (also kind of clever is the secret diggable patch beside it which doesn't have any stars coming out of it). The Climbing Thing
actually lets you climb everything for a medium amount of time. You just hold the walk button and move forwards up a wall. It controls surprisingly natural, as all you do is hold the walk button and you can just move along the wall like how Gordon Freeman doesn't climb ladders but just ascends along them, which makes traversing walls brisk and in line with the pacing of the rest of the level. When wallclimbing you can walljump a ridiculous horizontal distance off walls, which is also one way of solving the problem of not being able to otherwise gauge the distance between walls because of the lack of depth perception in an FPS. Basically, you can almost always make the jump.
The fun part of this power-up is that it can turn entire levels on their head because of the sheer freedom it gives you, like re-exploring the world after finding a new movement upgrade in a Metroidvania. Now you can go
everywhere, but the power-up is limited by a timer (and some invisible walls) so you can't use it at every point in the level and break everything. It's only unfortunate that E2M1 doesn't offer more of an opportunity to make full use of the Climbing Thing. Most of E2M1's fortress is already climbable through conventional means. Only a single tower with a Hallowed Health on top remains out of reach without the Climbing Thing, so outside of the silo the Climbing Thing is only good for one secret, even though the Climbing Thing provides tons of untapped potential.
After grabbing the red key the only way forwards is back towards the open field, where the game suddenly spawns three purple giant Wizards, who are basically just Duke Brothers with less health. Much like them they can also throw HOMING fireballs at you, which changes how you'll have to approach things from now on because circlestrafing around these projectiles isn't as effective in tighter spaces. Well, you can outrun a homing fireball, but when other enemies are attacking you at the same time you have to keep track of the remaining space where you can still move around safely, sooner prompting to you to break line of sight so the homing fireballs end up hitting something else. Or if you're really ballsy you can try reflecting them with your Sickles. On their own Great Wizards aren't a major threat, but in combination with others and in non-circular areas their homing fireballs makes Great Wizards top priority, since the fireballs are hard to shake off. However, it's hard to keep track of homing fireballs that are out of your field of view, so for fairness' sake a continuous audio cue could have played while you are being chased by a homing fireball, much like the homing missile alert in Descent, so you won't just get sucker punched by something you never saw coming.
The level gave you the Riveter slightly beforehand, which makes this a good opportunity to learn that Great Wizards can be solved with a double-tap from the Riveter. Also interesting is that the Great Wizards here spawn in a group of three. If it was just one, you'd run the risk of accidentally killing the Great Wizard too fast with the Riveter before it could even fire, leaving you wondering what the deal is with purple wizards. By having at least three Great Wizards spread out, the player is inevitably forced to deal with a homing fireball as none of the weapons in your arsenal are capable of killing three Great Wizards that quickly.
I do like this level, even if the first half is kind of a drag where you fight the bare minimum of soldiers while having to hide from artillery fire.
E2M2, The Unseen, is where Szymanski's affinity for horror really starts to shine through. E1M6 was merely spooky in comparison, this one actually managed to unsettle me. When you start the level, you already get the feeling that things aren't quite right. There is no background music playing at all even though it always did before this point, and there is no enemy to kill within 10 seconds of starting the level either. As you press on, the only background sound is the ambient noise of machinery, and the floor is littered with the bloody corpses of dead Soldiers. One room beyond that only contains bones and bloody remains. The bloody message on the wall (which obviously looks like it's been drawn with an MSPaint brush) tells you to not go down, so you obviously have to go down.
Behind the door there is a ladder leading underground, the passage to which is blocked by a barricade which you have to break, which makes it feel even more like you're intruding on the domain of an unspoken evil that had to be sealed away. At the end of the dark foggy underground tunnel there is an ominous red glow emanating from the red key, and behind it there's a message on the wall, saying
"DON'T TRUST YOUR EYES". As you pick the key up, you suddenly hear sounds of intense breathing. You can see nothing,
but the sounds are getting closer AND CLOSER. Just like the deforestation scene in Predator, the only thing a professional in the art of kicking ass can do in this situation is give into their fear and fire blindly around them, hoping you'll manage to at least cripple
it. And if you're fortunate, your bullets will unveil the Wendigo.
What makes this set-up such a brilliant exemplar of horror is that you're forced to deal with an unknown threat, and you're forced to
take a guess. When you pick up that key, you absolutely don't know what the hell the source of that sound is. And when that sound is getting closer and closer, your survival instinct should be telling you to GTFO. But the room you're in has only one way in and out, and the source of the sound is coming down along the same way. You'll realize you're cornered, and that the only way out is to fight your way out. But you don't know
what you're fighting because you can't see what's coming. If you're experienced with FPS's, you might be expecting some partially invisible enemy like a Spectre. Not this time. This one's completely invisible, and there sure is no prior precedent for a completely invisible enemy like this for you to be able to predict with greater accuracy what's coming through meta-knowledge. And so, the only option left is to take a guess and fire blindly down that hallway. Or let yourself get hit by something you can't see, and that's when the panic really starts acting up. But it's because you're left with no other option than to do something that you normally would never do (firing at nothing) while your life's at stake, that you're implicitly acknowledging you don't have full control of the situation and are merely
hoping this will work. And that insecurity and powerlessness, amplified by being locked in a spooky situation with an unknown invisible threat closing in, is what escalates your state of mind from mere tension to actual terror. And that's how the Wendigo has one of the strongest enemy introductions I've seen in any game.
The Wendigo is the Spectre to the Pinky, or in DUSK's case, to the Leatherneck. Wendigos behave and attack near-identically to Leathernecks, except their movement speed is a bit lower. What makes Wendigos special is that they're completely invisible. Not partially, but completely. The only signs that give them away are the loud breathing sounds and the trail of blood they leave behind on the floor. If you hit them once with anything, a loud string chord will play as their cloak has been permanently uncovered. While I said before that Leathernecks could be made more aggressive, I don't think the Wendigo needs it. It already has the advantage of starting off invisible. Giving an enemy that's invisible even greater offensive capabilities would be needlessly painful to deal with. Once discovered, Wendigos aren't much of a threat at all, what with basically being a slower Leatherneck, so the obvious course of action is to put the player in a situation where it's hard to discover them. Wendigos excel when used in dark areas or tight arenas combined with other enemies, where on top of the basic Wizards and such, you also have to deal with figuring out where the invisible Wendigos are since you can clearly hear them prowling around, making certain claustrophobic encounters even more tense.
To compensate for the level having such a slow start, the rest of the level is nothing but full-on action. The first part is hell of an effective enemy introduction. The only downside to it is that as with most horror material, it loses its fear factor on replays, so when replaying you have one minute of walking simulatoring in a creepy underground jail before you get to shoot anything, which is really quite dull when you've already seen the deer behind the curtains and know what to expect. I do think this was definitely worth it to make the first playthrough that much more memorable, but the best solution to appease first-timers and replayers would have been to add in a secret which lets you skip the walking simulator part entirely so you can skip straight ahead to the combat. Maybe by including a hint for the secret in the underground crypt so first-time players have to experience the Wendigo introduction first so they can't skip the intro by accident using the secret.
I do find it strange that the Wendigo is only used like once in the action part after the first two in the underground crypt (the part where the Wendigo gives itself away by knocking over some barrels), even though this is by all means the "Wendigo level" where the Wendigo gets first introduced. The level could have felt more coherent by following up on its introduction of new gameplay elements/enemies by playing around some more with them instead of treating Wendigos encounters completely separate from standard encounters. At the very least, it would be a more effective place to teach the player right after introducing the Wendigos about what it's like to deal with them amongst regular enemies, so the lessons are more likely to imprint themselves while the memory of their introduction is still fresh. It'd sure leave a stronger first impression.
Picking up the blue key causes two enemies to spawn on the ground and some more on the catwalks overlooking the blue key. Unfortunately one of the enemies that spawns right in your face as you pick the blue key up is a Great Wizard, which is kind of a dickish thing to do as it's very difficult to break line of sight with the ensuing homing fireballs in a tight space like that as the space is very tight, especially with the enemies overlooking you and the other Soldier spawning to your flank. A Great Wizard is also spawned on the catwalk above you for good measure, but after dealing with the one on the ground the most straightforward strategy is to stand under the catwalk so they can't see you at all, and then take potshots with the shotgun or with the not-so-secret Mortar. It's nice to try and spawn enemies on different height levels, but being able to stand directly underneath them kind of nullifies their threat level completely. Not a big fan of this encounter.
After that you get the Assault Rifle, which lets you go on a brief power trip as you ascend a staircase with a whole heap of Soldiers descending it, mowing down the Soldiers in your path as you aggressively push upwards. The level decides to end with bang in a large room where you have a row of Soldiers from one side and Welders from the other coming from the walls when you trigger the final switch, with there only being a single Fast-Fire totem to help you out. Unfortunately, this encounter is largely rendered void because
you can backtrack to the entrance which is stationed at the very corner of the room, allowing you to bottleneck all the enemies and pick them off one by one instead of risking standing in the middle of the arena where all the enemies have a lock on you. I assume the latter was how this fight was intended to play out, and that honestly would have been a lot more interesting than being able to bottleneck everything. This could have been very easily fixed by locking you in once the encounter started so you couldn't retreat anymore. A shame it didn't.
To its defense, the button that triggers the final encounter is placed at the opposite side of the entrance so you're more likely to fight within the heat of the battle instead of running away, but because buttons can be triggered by shooting them from a distance (as taught in E2M4) this aspect of the fight can be sidestepped. A simple fix here would have been to move the button from the wall and instead flip the direction its facing by placing it on a small signposted pillar, so you can't get a shot at the button from the position of the arena entrance.
Overall, the Wendigo intro was very good and the atmosphere right spooky, unfortunately most fights beyond that were poorly executed. Even then the Wendigo intro will be a waste of time on future replays when you know what's coming.
E2M3, Into the Thresher, is the biggest difficulty spike so far. Basically, when you step outside you'll find yourself at the bottom of a large pit with some jump pads, and all around the edge of the pit are enemies and more enemies, from every degree possible. Not just Wizards, but Welders and Great Wizards in the open too. This appears to be a recipe for disaster at first, but there are several measures in place to keep this level from being an overwhelming PITA.
First one is that from the bottom you can still see enemies overlooking the pit and snipe them in return with the Hunting Rifle you just got. So before jumping out of the pit you still have some time to orient yourself, as you can only see like 40% of the enemies from the bottom of the pit. The second is that enemies have a very hard time hitting you if you are bouncing on jump pads. The only way out of the pit is using a jump pad, so by the time you get up on solid footing most enemies will be missing you while you have some time to look around you. The third is that there's several containers in corner of the arena that's very close to the jump pad you likely jumped from. As you're bound to be swarmed by gunfire the moment you jump out, you might find yourself likely drawn to any kind of cover more so you can avoid the incoming fire. Even if you decide to retreat to the bottom of the pit again you will have aggroed nearly all enemies in the arena by jumping out of the pit, and most of them will be moving towards the edges of the pit to fire down at you, so even if you decide to play it safe you still have to deal with all the extra company.
There's several things to keep track of (homing fireballs, Welder spam, hard-to-see projectiles from the turrets) which come from a variety of distances that keeps this fight engaging. The only unfortunate part is that
the cover provided by the containers is provides too strong of a solution to this encounter and allows you to safely break line of sight with 95% of all enemies present. A lot of them are stuck on their respective ceilings and towers, so they can't really come down to come get you. There are several Welders/Great Wizards near the yellow key which have a good line of fire on the corner of the arena where all the cover is, but there's also a row of containers placed from the aforementioned corner to the yellow key which allows you to block line of sight with the enemies near the yellow key as well. Because of this, the corner in the arena tends to be an overly superior position because enemies can only weakly contest you on that position, giving you carte blanche to safely snipe enemies one by one with your Rifle instead of constantly considering where to move next or how to dodge the incoming projectiles. If there were some melee enemies placed near the corner to make it less safe, or if the row of containers from the corner to the yellow key was removed or made smaller in size to make enemies more likely to target you, or if the cover was destructible by enemy fire to prevent you from camping there indefinitely, then there would have been more options to consider for this fight.
The room around the blue key is a very tight space with an inner wall and pillars to clutter things further, but in a good way. I especially like the use of the Wendigo in a space like this, especially the outer walls that get raised to reveal more enemies once you pick up the blue key, putting you in a fight or flight situation where the way out isn't clear and enemies have you surrounded, with only the inner wall standing between you and them.
What's really weird is the fact that the floor is all grating. Beneath that grating there's another room whose floor is grating, and beneath
that grating there's a room chock-full of enemies who
have no trouble detecting and hitting you through two layers of dense grating. You can see the enemies below if you look through the gaps of the floor, but the game never hinted to the possibility of enemies being able to shoot through the floor. In fact, I don't recall floor grating and enemies shooting through them ever being a thing in the previous levels (let alone the later ones), so this isn't something the player would be familiar with. And this sure isn't the best way to introduce this element is either. At first you might hear the sound of enemies getting aggroed whose position you can't quite place, because placing enemies directly below the player isn't a possibility you'd have any reason to consider at this point in the game. The grating texture looks too dense for bullets to pass through it for that matter, yet the grating textures don't block shots at all regardless of whether they would pass through the holes in the texture. What happens is that this encounters gains a hidden layer of randomness you can't reliably react to.
The final room is kind of a cramped clusterfuck. When you grab the red key (situated on top of the first layer of grating), the floor below you disappears and leaves you falling into the final room. Inside, you've got the invisible Wendigos on the floor, Turrets and Welders overlooking you from a catwalk, and Soldiers overlooking you as well. The available space you have is basically halved by a giant generator in the middle which splits the room in two save for a small passage around the generator, with jump pads to the catwalk being present on only one side of the generator. There's so many different things to take in at once here after falling down by surprise, and because of the big generator the path (or the jump pads) that lead to the highest chance of survival here is largely obscured. It's not quite clear after falling down what you are really supposed to do to not die. You want to move past the Wendigos through the narrow passage to reach the other side of the room where the jump pads are, so you can jump on top of the catwalk away from the Wendigos and then deal with the several present Turrets and Welders already present on the catwalk on top of the Soldiers on the generator shooting you from below.
It's asking a lot on short notice because it surrounds you with enemies in all 360 degrees in a game where you can only see about 90-120 degrees at once, which prompts some trial and error to figure out this situation. For this reason it might be considered safer to snipe all the enemies through the grating to make the final room much easier, except that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having all those enemies arranged in such a way if the intended solution is to just safely snipe them all. It might be preferable to getting outright killed trying to clear the final room without getting hit or just dying, but it only adds more cheesing and playing it overly safe to the mix. If you want to be cheeky, you can also inch forward slightly when grabbing the red key in order to grab it without triggering the disappearing floors, allowing you to approach the final room by backtracking to the start and opening the red door from there which opens up at the catwalks, giving you a much safer avenue to take out everything one by one.
I believe if the generator in the middle was removed alongside the Soldiers on it so you'd immediately see the jump pads when falling down, this encounter wouldn't feel quite as overwhelming, and give you a better idea of what the path towards survival is. "Oh shit, I've fallen into a pit of invisible Wendigo's and I can't get u- oh there's a jump pad right here". Normally I would have applauded an encounter like this for having the balls to toss you into the lion's' den and push you outside your comfort zone, but this one does it with such a suddenness that it falls into trial 'n error territory.
Overall, the level is a mess. I enjoyed the spike in difficulty and the game deciding to finally go balls to the walls which gives us a sneak peek of how combat in DUSK can look like if you mix several enemy type together with the right number, sadly it still provides too many avenues for cheesing and the final room went a bit too far in this regard. The visuals for this level have been largely unremarkable, still donning a generic factory aesthetic. Once again another shoutout to zero-effort plain textured secret areas with
the secret area behind the hidden wall to the left of the yellow key looking like a tunnel in Minecraft. The final room is a bit different however, instead containing some satanic artifacts and ALL HAIL THE GREAT THRESHER being scrawled in blood on the walls. Then you jump inside the thresher, through the spiky machinery, and into a river of gore...
E2M4, The Infernal Machine, is where the madness
really begins and where DUSK stops chaining itself to reality. The introduction to this level stands out in particular. You start off by falling into a lake of blood and guts, which causes your flashlight to break (just don't think about it). The only way forward is to wade through a bloody claustrophobic crawlspace. The whole passage is ominously lit red and you don't have the slightest idea where the hell you are. But the real MVP for this level is the sound design.
Just have a listen to it. You're practically deafened by overwhelming industrial noise and the constant clanking of pistons slamming into walls and all the fire exhausts. Throughout the level there's always the ominous creaking and whirring of machinery. All this really helps sell the message that you're stuck in an... Infernal Machine...
While there's no combat or any serious challenge in the intro (aside from timing your movement so you don't get crushed by the massive pistons), getting through the intro and finding a weapon only takes about 20 seconds, so it doesn't impact the pacing or replay value too much. The first weapon you get is the single shotgun and one of the first enemies you see is the Welder, which I don't think is really the best enemy to throw at the player who only has a single shotgun at that point in the level. It takes four shots with a single shotgun to kill one Welder, and the Welders don't really have any flinch animation or visual feedback for when they get hit, which makes shooting them with a weaker weapon rather dissatisfying since it doesn't feel like your shotgun is having any impact, as opposed to when you can kill a Welder in a single shot.
Since the time it takes to kill them with the single shotgun is fairly slow and because the path forwards doesn't really allow you to squeeze past or move around two fat Welders, your only option at this point is to play popamole in 'n out of the corner, shooting once at the Welder and then quickly retreating around a corner before he can hit you. It doesn't make for an engaging encounter because you have to do the same thing four times in a row without any other variable present in the mix to make you reconsider your course of action between each shot. Even if you were to throw in weaker enemies like Soldiers into the mix, you'd logically prioritize them first since they go down much faster, but you still have to deal with that Welder using your single shotgun eventually. Normally the game hands you a more powerful gun at the start of a level if it decides to pit you against tankier enemies, and outside IM these complaints don't really hold any weight to begin with, but this is still worth pointing out so the same mistake doesn't get made in the future (thankfully it doesn't). For this reason the initial Welders would have been better off replaced with more regular Soldiers for example. At the same time I can still consider this a compliment as the game almost always avoids a situation like this by giving you a power weapon before encountering tankier enemies, only this situation in particular just isn't one of those cases.
Moving on, you enter some kind of tower whose walls are all grating, which you'll inevitably have to climb because there's a Climbing Thing here, except there's no way up. However, an obviously marked button is bound to catch your eye. Right next to it there's a blood message saying DON'T SHOOT THE BUTTON. So naturally you have to shoot the button. Modern developers tend to underrate reverse psychology. It certainly feels less handhold-y to have something telling you what you absodefinitivelutely shouldn't do, even if it's fundamentally no different than a magic message telling you what to do next. When you're telling the player to explicitly not to do something, deciding to do it anyways just to see what will happen still requires some exercise of your own agency in the game. Even though there's no other way to progress than doing the opposite of what you're told and even though the choice is little more than an illusion, it's still effective because most people will probably decide to break the rules out of their own volition before they can even discover there was no other option to begin with. And besides, it also adds to the cheeky nature of the game.
Up until this point in the game you never were required to shoot buttons in order to progress, even if it is something you could always do. You were just never told about it. There are a few opportunities in E1 where you can shoot a switch from a distance to trigger something you weren't meant to until later on in the level. I do think it's neat when games tell you a long time after the intro about abilities you always had, as on replays it can put the previous levels in a different perspective.
The blue key is at the end of a dead end tunnel of giant rotating saw blades with the center cut out for safe passage, which looks really trippy and nails the industrial horror theme of this episode really well. Flipping the switch at the end of the tunnel allows you to pick up the blue key, but it also grinds the giant sawblades to an ominous halt. These kind of games never had a solid track record of letting you pick up keycards without a surprise, and lo and behold, if you take a few steps back towards the end after picking up the key, you suddenly get a whole bunch of Grand Wizards and Welders on your plate. All homing fireballs, and no direct cover. Thankfully you can drop down to your left or right to break line of sight with the Great Wizards on the other side using the central taller path, but there's Great Wizards on both sides either way. On IM this fight is particularly interesting since the only power weapon you have at your disposal is the Mortar (short-to-medium range weapon). Normally you want to stay away from Great Wizards or get behind cover to avoid the wrath of their homing fireballs, but here you don't have the most optimal solution of sniping them from a safe distance while one-shotting the Welders along the way, so you have to get dangerously close (the Hunting Rifle is available prior to this point as a secret, however, but I can overlook weapons found only in secret areas making certain encounters easier. That's the reward, after all).
You can unfortunately move between the lower left and right path thanks through a gap in the central path near the end of the tunnel where they key was, which is too powerful of a safe zone. I think it could have used a group of rushing melee enemies on top of the Great Wizards and Welder sniping you from the other side of the tunnel, maybe even have the majority of enemies travel through one of the lower paths so you're forced to push forwards through the other so you can't just sit back and enjoy the fireworks, else you'd have enemies from behind coming through that gap to deal with.
Regrettably the remainder of the combat encounters in this level are lame. The level peaks in difficulty a bit too early with the giant saw blade tunnel fight. The blue room contains a bunch of Soldiers placed in a safe-for-you linear fashion, a single Wendigo, and a Great Wizard spawning in a bit after you pick up the SSG. Though there's a thin piece of cover inbetween both of you that blocks the homing fireballs anyways, nullifying most of the threat it could pose to you. Otherwise there'd be no cover at all in that part of the room, but it would have been a more interesting situation that if you wanted to move to safety you'd have to move past the Grand Wizard to where you entered in order to break line of sight to avoid the homing fireball, as they can usually fire one off in the time it takes for you to kill one with the SSG/HR.
The final stretch is a straight oblong tunnel, at the end of which three Wendigos get obviously spawned (you can see the particle effects from an enemy spawning in). Since it's just three Wendigos there is no real threat to this encounter, and the tunnel is broad enough for you indefinitely run circles around the Wendigos without ever risking being hit. If I can run circles around all the enemies with zero risk, you're doing it wrong. Kind of a disappointing note to end the level on. Or at least if you miss the final secret. This one is actually quite well hidden behind a breakable wall whose texture is obscured by the unusual red polka dot lighting on the surfaces near the level exit. This secret actually holds an entire encounter with a massive arena and tons of enemies to go with it. Something much more suitable as a final fight of a level, and I have to ask why this was made a secret in the first place. Unfortunately,
this encounters also suffers from being easily circlestrafable to death. The space is too spacious, flat, and unrestrictive, and there are next to no enemies placed near the edges of the arena to stop you in your tracks. The enemy pathfinding is such that they will all concentrate in the center of the arena if you keep running circles, and you can even make them kill each other because of all the in-fighting you cause by simply running circles. There could have been a cool final encounter here, but the unrestrictive combat space turns this encounter into something completely braindead to do. Why move towards the center and deal with getting shot from every angle when you can run along the edges with most of your flanks covered by the walls? It also doesn't help how comparatively bland this arena looks compared to the rest of the level with its standard warehouse aesthetic.
This level certainly starts interesting and overall the level is strong visually, but the later encounters in the level are pretty damn weak. The level progression flows well, anyways. This level also holds a secret exit, which leads us to...
E2MS, The Foundry. This level is fun. This level is
fast. This level is fun because it is
fast. The unspoken theme of this level is that it is essentially a parkour level using all the movement techniques available in DUSK.
The background theme for this level is a non-dynamic piece which plays at a constant high intensity just to hit the point home. It's even called "Run", for crying out loud.
There's a dozen several obstacles in this level which you need to jump or either slide over, present right from the start of the level. It's not something that's particularly difficult, but it keeps you engaged and on the move, which again feeds back into the idea that this level is about speed. After that you're jumping around pipeworks to get up. 5 seconds after that a jump pad takes you up to several Soldiers in your face. 10 seconds after that you're playing hopscotch over lava with jump pads while being shot at. Ten seconds later you're climbing up a wall, walljumping back and forth between two walls and one-shotting the Turrets inbetween with your HR. The pacing of this level is ludicrous, it constantly keeps throwing you into wildly different situations which is precisely what makes this level feel like it's hopped up on speed.
The first real enemy encounter, where you jump up a shaft using a jump pad right into the line of sight of four Soldiers, does a neat thing where it gives you an Assault Rifle, which is especially useful for these four Soldiers, but only right after you aggroed them. On IM the only gun you have at that point is the Hunting Rifle, which is overkill for a single Soldier and too slow to take out four Soldiers in quick succession as opposed to an AR. So you have to make a slight aggressive push forward to grab that AR which gives the Soldiers enough time to fire off one salvo at you, not giving you enough time to either backtrack to cover or to kill them all before they can shoot you, which makes for a neat small risky encounter.
The part after that where you have to jump over a river of lava using conveniently placed jump pads also puts you under constant fire by a Welder, which you ideally should oneshot with your HR while flying through the air. However, it's complete wasted potential that there weren't any more Welders or other enemies to keep shooting at you to keep you occupied while you're trying to land on another jump pad instead of lava. As it stands, there's only one Welder on the other side of the river you can one-tap with your Rifle while hopping uncontested over the remainder of the river. It is only unfortunate that this level doesn't toy with the idea of having more than one enemy shoot at you while you're hopping over lava where the challenge arises from trying to do two different things simultaneously.
The next part where you have to wall climb up a tower by jumping between two walls where each floor has a Turret on it manages to be fair because the Turrets have a limited turning speed unlike the rest of the enemies, so you can do a ridiculous walljump and land behind the turrets while keeping them stunlocked with your AR. Or you can slowly crawl up and try to take potshots. After getting the key you have to go back over the river again, which again feels kind of lopsided considering there's again only one Welder, instead of there at least being more than one to increase the difficulty curve especially on obstacles you already crossed before.
The rest of the level makes some real good use of the Soldier/Welder + Assault Rifle/Hunting Rifle dynamic established in E2M1. Double-tap the small ones, switch and one-tap the big ones. Each room is different enough in its layout to stand out, like the big vertical staircase room where you find the yellow key, and the
unfortunately somewhat plain green room where you can just bottleneck everyone into coming towards you. One room beyond that will also spawn three Soldiers behind you. That one really borders on being bullshit, but there's enough thought behind the sudden placement of the Soldiers there for me to overlook it. That room is a dead end, with the only way forward being a ladder to your left going up. So by the time you turn left, you will hear some loud enemy teleporting sounds which should prompt to have you look behind you (which you should have already been doing). Because you were already turning left you shouldn't be at such a major disadvantage in terms of being able to react on time, but some factors like not having your AR equipped already or the AI deciding to be whimsical and spreading out instead of lining up can make this a death knell on DUSKMARE. Not as much of a problem on other difficulties, and this wasn't intended to cheaply shit on the player, but RNG can decide to be a bitch at times with enemy reactions.
The next room is an incredibly tall obstacle course with several paths you can take to rush forwards, like rocketjumping over the massive blocks after finding the Riveter or using the jump pads to strike the enemies from above, or using the Climbing Thing to climb everything. It's a very interesting space to navigate as you're not locked into taking a single path, but sadly it lacks the amount of enemies (or enemy types) necessary to really challenge you on your mad frontal assault after grabbing the Riveter. You only get to deal with three Soldiers at once and the occasional sole Welder. At this point everything in the level is just a pushover. Even more so if you climb on the walls to get on top of the tubes where the secret stash is hidden, so you can cross over a large part of the obstacle course anyways without having to really deal with the peasants on the floor.
The end of this level consists of a bunch of Welders and Great Wizards in a straight narrow corridor which you can easily dispatch within four seconds with your Riveter with minimal risk to yourself. The staircase room beforehand having a less threatening presence of enemies could have worked as a build-up to a bigger final encounter, but it didn't, so the whole thing falls flat.
Call me a traditionalist, but I do believe that having a solid difficulty curve is integral to the flow of a level. When or before you reach the level exit it should have an appropriate enough conclusion or test of skill beforehand so the end doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere or that the level feels like it's petering out of ideas. If the only incline in difficulty is at the very start and everything later on becomes progressively easier, then it won't feel like you're getting the opportunity to use these weapons you found scattered around the level, and you end up with little to look forward to. If you overcome a certain hurdle you know you can handle everything on that level of difficulty, so subsequent hurdles have to be placed higher and higher to make you feel like you're improving and to not leave you disappointed by giving you nothing to use your newfound skills against. The same goes with any good puzzle game, each one tries to reapply existing skills in a way you wouldn't have thought of before. Especially on IM you'll get stronger the more weapons you find, so the enemy threat level needs to suit your offensive capabilities accordingly. There's a time and place for victory laps where you can inflict some carnage with minimal effort, but if it isn't accompanied with some build-up in difficulty or doesn't happen after a noticeable difficulty spike, the victory lap doesn't feel as deserved.
All in all, while I loved the break-neck pacing of this level and the rate at which new encounters were thrown at the player, the difficulty curve couldn't quite keep up, causing the level to suffer quite a bit especially during the rooms you have to revisit, as you have to deal with existing layouts without differing enemy placements to turn them upside down and keep them interesting on repeat visits. Some of the rooms here also present quite a bit of wasted potential for aforementioned reasons.
E2M5, The Escher Labs, is probably this episode's most favourite level for a lot of people. As this is a laboratory level, this is where things get a bit experimental...
Things start off fairly innocuously. The whole place has a sterile bluish tint to it with sterile wall and ceiling textures which could pass this off as a Half-Life 1 level, almost giving you an idea of what (not) to expect. There's one room with some neat attention to detail where you can shoot a bunch of Soldiers with your AR, and the room is filled with tables with glassware on them, so what ensues is a John Woo-esque gunfight where you'll be shooting through the glasswork to hit the Soldiers, resulting in glass shards flying everywhere which kinda nails the chaotic nature of a gun fight. DUSK is too graphically simple to do anything fancy with environmental destruction after a gunfight the same way a game like F.E.A.R. does, but seeing an attempt made is nice nonetheless.
Then you find yourself a conspicuous red syringe, and the voice in your head is telling you to take it. Now, the FBI may have said that winners don't do drugs, but most winners usually don't find themselves suddenly encircled twenty to one by others holding guns and syringes of dubious content. Thankfully the red syringe contained the Serum of Blistering Heat... which is literally a Superhot power-up where time moves when you do. But it's something you'll really need, as with time slowed down to a halt you can figure out a plan for how you're going to get yourself out of this sticky situation. There's conveniently placed explosive barrels everywhere, so you don't need to be Einstein to figure this one out.
It's a neat gimmick power-up for when the odds are suddenly stacked against you. Instead of a "time moves when you do" power-up an invincibility power-up could have been placed there for roughly the same effect, but all the old games did invincibility power-ups already. Why not decide to go for something more original instead (by lifting a concept from another game)? It doesn't always need to be the trifecta of DPS Boost/invincibility/invisibility for power-ups.
This circle of enemies also contains Scientists. Since this is the lab level, it's appropriate to talk about them now even if they first appeared since E1M9. Scientists are... a joke? At least I believe so, because I don't see the point of a melee enemy with the near-exact same behavior as the Leathernecks, but with an even lower movement speed, and slightly lower HP too. I figure these guys are just here because of the laboratory aesthetic of this level rather than pose an actual threat to the player. I still don't see the point of putting in effort into making an inferior clone of an existing enemy type especially when the differences in HP are negligible. Like, the Hell Knight/Barons in Doom 2 gave mappers better tools for when you wanted a tanky Imp or a REALLY tanky Imp, but here the difference between Scientist/Leatherneck HP is too small to really justify their existence. It'd be funny at least if the syringes they stab you with actually made you trip out, but they don't, so even as a joke enemy they would feel half-assed.
While you can escape the death circle towards the entrance and bottleneck every enemy to death again, the Superhot power-up gives you enough of an edge in this fight that there's enough of an incentive for you to not want to play it safe (on top of enemies partially blocking your path anyways), so in this instance I can overlook it.
After this power trip, returning to the lobby shows you that 'something isn't quite right', as the room has changed shape and now holds a new path onwards that was never there before. After following that path and flipping a switch in a cul-de-sac, turning around reveals that the entire level has been turned on its head, quite literally. The floor is the ceiling and staircases have been flipped a ninety degrees. An unique method of reusing assets, for sure. This disregard for common sense and common architectural practices makes it a difficult space to comprehend, but thankfully you'll find all you need to do is climb upwards with a Climbing Thing on the bottom helping you out so you are unlikely to get too disoriented. The level doesn't try to be really difficult at this point, and I think that's a reasonable approach to take here. Part of the difficulty already comes from figuring out this abstract space, so adding tons of oddly placed enemies in an odd space could potentially overwhelm the player. It also helps that the level didn't immediately try to be abstract and turn everything upside-down, otherwise the twist wouldn't be as impactful. It let you get a bit used to the level before subverting expectations.
The inspiration for this level couldn't be more obvious the moment you pass through the spiraling corridor with the checkerboard-patterned 'floor', or the secret right beside its exit where you find The Sword. The secret message even says "Thanks Constantine". The teleporter on the wall will lead you inside some kind of gory ribcage where you can find the red key. It spawns two Wendigos when you do this, but again, there's too much free space to these guys aren't much of a real challenge. I did say before it was reasonable for the level to take it easy, but this ribcage is a fairly open flat space which shouldn't be that difficult to comprehend. If you're going to put in some enemies in for filler anyways, it's better to use less tankier ones so you have the more plentiful satisfaction of just killing something quickly.
Just when you thought things couldn't get weirder enough, here's a pitch black void with small floating islands. The central largest island holds a silo, and from it comes some unsettling moaning. Open it up, and out comes MAMA. It's a cyborg midwife (with a hat on!). As your boss fight for this level, MAMA has a Riveter mounted to her belly button which can fire a burst of rockets/rivets at you at incredibly high speeds. Could the floating islands be used to create a compelling boss encounter where you must combine platforming and constant shooting at MAMA while being mindful of which platform you can safely jump towards? Ha ha, no.
Just run circles around the silo and keep airbursting your Mortars around the silo to keep damaging MAMA while she's out of your sight. Do this 20 times and a winner is you.
It's not the last we've seen of MAMA, as her kind will reappear as Cowgirls in subsequent levels, acting as the Baron of Hell stand-in capable of taking and dishing it out, and taking around three Rivets to kill. Every enemy in the game will just melt the moment you get your hands on the Riveter and some ammo for it, but Cowgirls are the only ones really capable of posing a more persistent threat against the player without getting immediately deleted. But that's what makes it so unfortunate that Cowgirls are only used very rarely to fill the niche of bulletsponge (that can actually fight back as opposed to the Forkmaiden). They barely appear in Episode 3, for that matter.
On the whole the level is undeniably creative, even if I wish it took the time to further reiterate on the idea of the Superhot power-up with more escalative enemy setups. However, as expected the boss fight was a waste of time. Overall one of my favourites in this episode for its theme alone.
E2M6, The Erebus Reactor, is a bit of an oddball. The main idea behind it is CHAOS, which while unique for this game, leaves something to be desired. The fact that this level is called The
Erebus Reactor might be a reference to the level Mt. Erebus from Doom, by Sandy Petersen. In fact this whole level oozes Petersen, because it's basically a city level without a city theme.
The level starts with you entering a massive open arena peppered with buildings, structures, a massive fissure with lava at the bottom, but also ENEMIES EVERYWHERE. As you climb the initial staircase you will be shot at from multiple directions (thankfully not from behind), forcing you to either back up and bait everyone towards your safespot, charge headfirst into the unknown where you are very likely to die, or run towards the nearest piece of cover. On Intruder Mode you have no weapons to reliably kill the enemies you could bait towards the safe level start anyways, so you're practically forced to charge onwards in order to find some weapons. There is a Pistol to the left of the initial staircase, a Mortar behind a safe piece of cover, and a Hunting Rifle which is very risky to get because you'll risk standing in the crossfire between multiple enemies from multiple directions. However, the Mortar is very inefficient at taking out all the Soldiers and Welders in the level, while the Hunting Rifle ammo is scarce in this level and best saved up for the Welders. Because you don't get the right weapons or enough ammo to deal with the swathes of Soldiers and Welders the game throws at you, what will likely ensue is you aimlessly bunnyhopping around the level, trying to find a better weapon but only finding more enemies, but more importantly, trying to figure out where the hell you're supposed to go next. If you don't get killed in the process, that is.
On the first handful of attempts this sheer level of chaos may be exciting and something that plays out somewhat differently each time, but only if you let it carry you along. Despite being forced to run around naked for the first twenty seconds on IM, there's still plenty of ways to cheese the level because of its huge open nature. You can take the jump pads up the catwalks which overlook the entire level and rain death from above (after taking care of the enemies on the catwalks), or you can
bottleneck half of all the starting enemies in a narrow strip behind some buildings because the enemy pathfinding is derp, especially with the huge fissure in the ground being a massive obstruction to the AI's pathfinding. That's kind of the drawback by having 95% of the level be immediately available to the player without colored keygates forcing the player into an encounter which the designer has more control over. As with most games chaotic, once you figure out a good route through the level it's all just going through the motions. You could also decide to just take a random direction from the start to see what happens, but ideally I shouldn't have to LARP and pretend I can't just take the more consistent option for my survival in this level.
The first key you have to find is in an enclosed shack with no windows or whatsoever to suggest from a distance that the yellow key is here. On one hand, this implicitly encourages you to prioritize killing all the present enemies first before you go keyhunting for real, as finding keys (except for the first one) spawns in more enemies, which may overwhelm you if you didn't finish off the existing wave. On the other hand, this makes finding the key needlessly obscure once you
are finished killing everything. Especially given how such a small building in this wide open level doesn't particularly stand out. It is also at this point where the level starts to really decline.
Once you get the yellow key, there are actually two buildings on opposite sides of the level that are locked by a yellow gate. One holds an Assault Rifle and the blue key you need, and the other only holds... a diamond and some enemies, including a Cowgirl? What? On subsequent playthroughs I just never opened this building at all because unless you're doing a 100% kills run, because why would you? It doesn't even count as a secret. This building is nothing more than a questionable gotcha moment which becomes a passing joke once you realize you don't have to open it at all to finish the level.
Picking up the blue key causes a bunch more Soldiers to spawn in, but now that you have the Assault Rifle it's just a matter of hanging back and easily mowing them all down with two-round bursts, making this come down to mostly routine work and jumping around one half of the level again to ensure you didn't miss any straggler Soldiers. The new Soldiers are teleported in from a distance where their bullets will take a while to actually hit you, so this whole ordeal makes it hard to actually die in, especially given all the cover you have. I don't have much against filler fights, but I'd rather they be short in order to fill in the dead space between major encounters. This level is so spacious that the amount of dead space to fill for a filler encounter would be somewhat stretch the meaning of filler. At least the Soldiers spawn in a breadcrumb trail of where you need to be next.
Inside the blue building there's a close quarter encounter to spice things up a little. Because of the room's O-shape (with catwalks inside on the edges of the room and enemies on them) it would involve a lot of cornerhumping to deal with the enemies, as the room is too tight in terms of space to avoid all the projectiles while killing everything at the same time. But there's a secret Superhot power-up inside the blue building which allows you to deal with everything inside without having to hide as much. Given how this alternative approach would allow the player to be a lot more proactive than doing the usual routine of popping in and out from a corner popping an enemy one by one, I don't think it would be such a bad idea if the Superhot power-up was moved from the secret to around the center of the O-room, where the player would have to make a risky grab for it and put themselves in the middle of the crossfire, as situations where you're surrounded only plays to the strengths of the power-up.
Picking up the red key inside only spawns a bunch more enemies outside. Again, something that's trivialized by taking a jump pad to get on top of the catwalks and rain death from above. At this point you're no longer constrained by having barely any weapons and ammo, which is about the only thing that made the first part of the level work as intended (on IM). Sadly the size of the new enemy forces does not pose a threat against you once you're fully equipped, let alone in a wide open space (and catwalks from high up where these enemies can't contest you on), again making this whole part feel like a crapshoot. The size and structure of the level seems to be more designed around the initial horde of enemies when you're outnumbered AND outgunned.
I almost forgot to mention where most of the secrets in this level are concentrated, and that's on the incredibly long steel beams crisscrossing the arena from tower to tower in a massive spiderweb. On top of each tower there's a secret, though save for the Riveter secret most of the weapons here are overkill for the rest of the level itself, assuming you won't do anything as suicidal as trying to walk the steel tightropes when you haven't cleared out all enemies below yet. I'm not a fan of these type of secrets at all because of how completely divorced they are from the rest of the level and the amount of legwork required to get to them. If it was some kind of super secret with super useful rewards I might have overlooked it, but the steel beams here are visible in plain sight and not that hard to reach using the jump pads. These types of secrets break up the pacing of the level a bit too much. These old-school shooters manage to balance combat and exploration neatly, so secrets mostly pertain to hidden walls or tricky-to-get positions you can get to in a second or 10 without significantly impacting the pacing of a level. It'd be one thing if you voluntarily spent a lot of time trying to make a tricky jump to a secret and failing repeatedly, but here there's simply a lot of mandatory legwork involved to get to the secrets on top of each tower by having to bunnyhop across several beams (and making sure you hop onto the right one).
Then after getting the red key, go outside, and you'll trigger a setpiece which opens a massive ceiling in the sky to reveal you're in some kind of city? It sure looks cool. Last not but least, there's yet another bossfight against... Big John.
"HUAHHUABIGJOHNDASMEDAUWKEELMEHUAHUAKAMAWNNKEELMEHUAHUAHUAHUADAUW". He's basically a supercharged Soldier, but his Assault Rifle got a ridiculous amount of random spread so if you don't want to get hit you should get as far away as possible. Thankfully the Riveter secret allows you to shave off a good 80% of his health before he can start attacking, after which he can be finished off with the Hunting Rifle in a span of 6 or so seconds. Big Who?
Erebus Reactor, much like your usual Petersen level, has a memorable core concept or idea, but rather questionable implementation of said concept. I don't mind RNG in my shooties when it comes to enemy behavior at least, see how enemies can patrol around at random in Descent, but the AI here can't really take advantage of such a concept, so it's ultimately the player's actions and our imperfect nature that acts as an organic driving force to make the first part of the level that excitingly chaotic. Unfortunately the openness of the level is at the same time its downfall, as it gives the player plenty of room to execute several cheese strats (the high-up catwalks being the worst offender), and the amount of buildings that provide you with cover would make any further teleporting of huge amount of enemies in rather redundant. At the very least the level is very striking visually, with the interweaving steel beams and cracks in the floor giving the level a greater sense of space than it can actually make any good use of. The final setpiece is also something to behold your first time around. Big John is an inoffensive pushover, but at this point I feel that complaining any further about the boss fights in DUSK or first-person shooters in general is getting more repetitive than the bosses themselves, so I'll leave it be.
After the massive gravity shaft ride we end up in
E2M7, Neobabel. Compared to the harsh goriness of the last handful of levels, this level gives off a more serene feeling. It's a floating temple and everything has this surreal mustard color, and the soundtrack is aptly ambient for this level as well. From the outside the level is completely symmetrical, which I normally abhor because symmetrical levels often will have you do one thing in one half of the level and almost always the exact same thing in the other half of the level, making for a rather predictable level. Thankfully during battles both halves of this level are joined rather than separated, so you don't have to repeat an encounter in the other half. Though the symmetricality does rear its head a bit if you want to get both starting shotguns, which are each placed on a small tower placed on the left and right of the central temple, where you have to boost yourself up the central temple with a jump pad and take the jump pad on top of the temple to boost yourself towards one of the two towers, which you'll have to repeat to get to the other one as well. I feel the redundancy could be lessened a bit if there was only one tower you could boost yourself towards form the temple top which would contain all the weapons.
The exterior part of the level starts by handing you a Hunting Rifle first, which is rather apt given how large the exterior part is and how far away all the enemies are. On top of the temple roof there are two Grand Wizards, but their placement is largely ineffective because they're spawned with their backs towards you so they won't aggro if you're close, and the temple roof provides ample pillars and a difference in height between the parts of the temple roof you and they are on that makes it trivial to break line of sight with their homing fireballs. Considering how open the exterior is and that you're given a Hunting Rifle right from the start, it wouldn't have been such a bad idea to have the Grand Wizards be aggroed from the start. Though their homing fireballs are of the perpetually-turning-towards-the-player-type and have a very long decay time, which in a level with no encompassing walls may result in some shenanigans where a homing fireball misses you, and then keeps slowly turning and turning until it's heading towards you again from behind, which slows down the pacing of the game as you're trying to shake them off by trying to get them to bump into a wall. It's why I'm more in favor of homing projectiles which work like actual seeking missiles in a dogfighting game or Descent where they only keep tracking you as long as you're in their cone of acquisition. Alternatively the turning speed of homing projectiles could be lessened when you kill the Grand Wizard that launched it, so there's some more value in prioritizing them.
The interior of the temple starts empty, save for some rats and Superhot power-up on top of a central pillar you can't quite reach. The only thing left is to grab the Assault Rifle and flick the switch, which... opens up the walls to reveal a whole bunch of Soldiers and Scientists for your surprise birthday party... while you're stuck in a tight position and the entrance is behind all these Soldiers. But if you have a nose for traps and remembered that shooting switches is still a thing,
you could instead shoot the switch from a distance nearby the temple entrance, so you won't be as constricted. Doing so reveals a jump pad to your left which you can use to boost yourself to the second floor from where you can jump on top of the central pillar to get the Superhot power-up and let loose on all these Soldiers.
Or you can just hang back from where you trigger the switch and take care of all the Soldiers one by one. The weird part about this encounter is that it won't immediately aggro
all present Soldiers. The AI only aggroes on line of sight or being hit, not upon hearing a player sound like your gun being fired, making it easier to single out targets behind a corner depending on the enemy's facing direction. The walls will make Soldiers appear to the left and right of the hallway, but from the position where you trigger the switch only the Soldiers to the right can actually see you and get aggroed the moment you trigger the switch, effectively halving the amount of enemies you have to deal with, and even then the level geometry prevents you from being in the line of sight of enemies on that right half of the room, so it's even less than 50% of the enemies you'll have to deal with at once. Then once that's done you can do the same for the other half. This approach is probably more preferable than being swarmed in a position where you can't circlestrafe or backpedal while not having much of a reason to push forwards towards the temple entrance, but at the same time it leaves the Superhot power-up unused.
Other than this encounter, there aren't any other encounters in the immediate vicinity whose intensity would warrant the power-up without its usage feeling like overkill. Power-ups like these are best used in situations that would have been highly difficult otherwise. But having to run past all the Soldiers and all their bullets just to get to the jump pad so you can get the power-up feels needlessly convoluted if hanging back and picking off all Soldiers one by one works just as fine, which I figure is what most people will do. To that end it may have been a better idea to have the pillars lower the moment the encounter starts so you can actually get to the power-up from the ground while all enemies are properly aggroed beforehand. By placing the power-up in arms' reach of the player and having enemies swarm in, it should be very clear that you should go pick up the power-up if you don't wanna die.
What remains in the level is another lone building on the other side of the sky island. If you found the switch inside the temple which mysteriously opens some kind of smokestack, you'll find a secret Climbing Thing in the opened smokestack which lets you climb said building for a secret. And a somewhat redundant secret if you fully climb its roof. What this allows you to do is take a peek inside where all the enemies are waiting for you, and
pick them off one by one in order to reduce the level of resistance once you enter the building for real, which also had another Superhot power-up placed right in the entrance. Inside you can also use the Climbing Thing to climb the many higher-up alcoves, of which only two hold any secrets. I wonder why those two aren't consolidated into one secret, because you essentially find and discover both secrets the same way; by realizing you can use the Climbing Thing to climb the building from the inside. If more than one secret can be found with the same solution, it just doesn't hold the same sense of reward.
Unlike the previous Superhot power-up, abstaining from using this second Superhot power-up immediately isn't a waste, because once you take the teleporter you'll suddenly find yourself teleported in a circular room filled to the brim with Welders, Soldiers, Grand Wizards, and no way out. Which once you grab the Superhot (and the Rapid-Fire Totem immediately in front of you once you teleport in) doesn't seem so daunting all of a sudden. That's the fun part about power-ups, you can use them in more situations than one. The natural response to a situation like this is to circlestrafe the hell away, and thankfully the room accommodates that by being donut-shaped and placing most enemies on a catwalk overlooking the place rather than physically obstructing your path. This may seem contradictory given that I have criticized circlestrafing as being too dominant of a strategy for a good part of this article, but for this case I'm willing to make an exception. Here you're suddenly thrust into an unknown room, and by accommodating fallback strategies like circlestrafing you can avoid this room being a case of trial 'n error when you get killed before you can properly assess the situation. Even so, the room itself is tight and dense enough with enemies that even if you are circlestrafing it still remains enough of a challenge to dodge incoming projectiles in such a small space while also having to deal with the Grand Wizard.
The level ends by teleporting you into another room, but this time its much darker and has some rotating blades, as if to signify we are going from the serene temple business back to grindhouse-core horror again, which in a way ties neatly with the next level. The encounters are interesting, though at this point in the campaign it feels like the 'grab a Superhot power-up while being surrounded' type of encounter is starting to become stale because of how identical the enemy setups in those encounters are. The "point of no return" rooms such as where you suddenly get teleported into an unknown room finally show some glimpses of brilliance by not allowing you to just cheese everything to death. Overall, a decent level.
E2M8, Blood and Bone, is alongside E2M4 and E2M5 probably one of the most aesthetically pleasing levels this episode. Sadly most of the encounters here are downright plain and the secrets are weak.
The way forwards is gated off and you can go either left or right. Going left will net you a secret single Shotgun which is too damn obvious to be a secret since it just involves exploring the space immediately available to you. To the right is a staircase winding downwards with enemies on every twist, but the limited space at your disposal and the fact you're given a Hunting Rifle as soon as you get there means you can methodically and repetitively take out every single enemy one by one. Don't forget the super-obvious grate you can break for some secret ammo. Once you get the yellow key at a bottom it's a dead end and you have to go back up again, so some extra Soldiers are spawned which you can also methodically dispatch one by one with your dual pistols. The Wendigo at the top of the staircase is an interesting twist at least, as this invisible bulletsponge is blocking your path in this narrow staircase, but because of the lack of any supporting enemies or elements you can just backpedal and use your HR against it.
One of the next big rooms has a Welder and Great Wizard to the left and right of the entrance of the room, which is most consistently dealt with by backing up, and then popping in and out of the entrance taking potshots with your Hunting Rifle, methodically and repetitively. You could rush forward and try to be a badass, but what you are likely to find out the hard way doing so is that if you cross the halfway point of the room, that suddenly a bunch of Soldiers will spawn in. So now you have to deal with both Soldiers and Great Wizards/Welders at the same time, all spread out across the edges of the room to make circlestrafing not exactly the most ideal thing to do (or any kind of dodging, not to speak of the homing fireballs in the mix). That is, unless you don't rush forward but slowly pick apart all present enemies instead before having the Soldiers spawn in.
After hopping down a pit it's again more of the same shit. Pop in and out of the room entrance to plink at the Welders, Great Wizards (and a Turret) with your HR.
Methodically and repetitively. Take the jump pads all the way up where the three Welders and Scientists are, and take a shot with the HR each time you bounce in and out of their field of vision using the jump pad,
methodically and repetitively. Normally I like to go out of my way doing things dangerously to look cool, but it should be realistically possible (on DUSKMARE) to do, and the 'safe' strat for a fight shouldn't be so downright obvious and easy to perform. There should exist some incentives to step out of your comfort zone, which the levels themselves can do (and have done in DUSK) by taking away some methods of cheese you could always rely on. To that end Hunting Rifle ammo could have been made more scarce as you'll be primarily relying on it in this level with all these Welders and Great Wizards. Anyways, having to play whack-a-mole with the Hunting Rifle around three times in a row starts to get old.
Things aren't made much better when you have to go back to the first room with the huge windows after getting the key, which now features four Great Wizards spread out across the room and a bunch of Scientists. I like Great Wizards, but putting four of 'em spread around in each corner of a relatively small room with minimal cover to break line of sight with the homing fireballs, on top of some grunt enemies skittering around (at least Scientists aren't a complete joke in this instance), attacking aggressively just
isn't feasible unless you want to eat a homing projectile from one of the four stooges. Bottlenecking every enemy here will work just fine instead, as you get ample time and space to do so. Funnily enough you can also jump from the ramp that leads into the room, which lets you see the tip of each Great Wizard without aggroing anyone, allowing you to take out all enemies one by one with the HR
again.
After the blue gate and a walk through pure darkness you find yourself walking up to some kind of tower, and then getting ambushed by Soldiers everywhere spread out all around you. You could either carve your way forwards behind some of the pieces of cover on the tower plateau, but the more likely reaction to such an "oh, shit" moment of suddenly seeing several Soldiers in front of you is to retreat to a known safe position instead of charging into the unknown. And just like with almost every other encounter in this level, all you need to do is back up and have the enemies come towards you in a bottleneck where you can clean them up with your Assault Rifle with minimal risk to yourself,
AGAIN.
That's pretty much it as far as combat goes, the only thing left is to fall down this shaft into a pitch-black basement as the fall broke your flashlight again. The layout isn't exactly straightforward enough that you can get around just by feeling the walls, fortunately the smoke and slight light sources can give you a vague idea of the layout you're in, but if you're crafty you can illuminate the way forwards by using the muzzle flash of your pistols. After you trigger the switch a Wendigo will spawn in, which makes for an interesting encounter because you can't pinpoint where it exactly is because of all the DARKNESS. After that you walk down a rather long staircase, where after almost each turn there's a different message scrawled with blood on the walls telling a bit more about the backstory, which is pretty inventive way of imparting a sequence of text passages on the player. Then around the last twist of the staircase you'd expect another message, but it was actually a Wendigo! Which, again, works as a surprise given the narrow nature of the staircase, even if it's easily killable by backing up slowly.
Not that we're quite there yet, because you have to power up this machine by feeding the altar with raw meat in order to power up some ominous green power line that's been running through a good part of this level. Then when you turn back you can clearly see some items under the staircase, and grabbing that somehow counts as a secret. Come on,
something in plain sight and easily within reach has no business being called a secret.
Not like that's the dumbest secret in this level. In the prior dark basement you can find a secret red key, which you can only use by going to the end of the level, taking the teleporter to the start of the level, and going down the gray staircase to open the red door for some Hallowed Health. Which is damn well useless because all enemies should be dead by now. Unless you're playing outside IM so you can carry the bonuses over to the next level, but on IM there's absolutely zero reason to go for this secret for non-completionist reasons, especially not if you consider you have to go through
over half of the entire level again if you want to grab this secret. This means going back to the gray staircase area, falling back down the long dark shaft again (doing this twice in a row in a short timespan can highlight how the setpiece-itis in DUSK can hurt the game somewhat on replays) except without the ominous voice in your head (and funnily enough the fall won't break your flashlight this time), and going back down the bloody staircase again. You have this entire detour for some shit you won't really get to use. A secret like this shouldn't even sound good on paper.
The most effort seems to have went into making this level look visually a bit more standout. The large rooms with all the Great Wizards look especially striking because of the red dusky skybox you get to see because of the massive glasshouse windows, which casts an overarching shadow over the whole place, lending the room a certain level of visual depth most levels in DUSK simply lack because of this low-poly art style, and I certainly wouldn't object to seeing lighting like this be used as the defining visual feature (rather than your usual flatly textured inner areas, such as the first gray staircase). The two shafts you have to fall through aim to look pretty because of a pulsating effect used by seeing lights whiz by, like driving down a tunnel. The tower together with the Soldier ambush and open sky lends it a rather oppressive effect, and the atmosphere in the basement certainly is creepy. Unfortunately most of the combat encounters feel samey because they can be solved using the same strategy, without anything forcing you to change things up. Overall a pretty bad level, and plain offensive if you factor in the secrets.
E2M9, The Dig, is just wholly unremarkable. Like the title suggests, it's a kind of underground ruins level slash digging site, though there isn't much in the vein of fantastic underground architecture to look at. Here you're given the Crossbow from the start and ample ammo to go with it, which lets you go ham on all the Wizards. And most enemies really if you remember you can shoot bolts through walls.
At least the start of the level is bold. Walk a few steps forward and you'll suddenly hear multiple Wendigos on your tail. On IM you won't have any weapons at this point, but thankfully there's a Riveter behind the forklifts which should let you frag both Wendigoes with at least four out of five given Rivets. You'll probably die on IM if you don't notice the Riveter, as it's not 100% obvious what with it being obscured by the forklifts, which for clarity's sake could have been removed or moved a bit out of the way to make it impossible to miss the Riveter. If you somehow miss and fail to kill both at once with the ammo you got, then you can at least run past down the level to find the Crossbow or a Pistol in order to finish off the Wendigos, so at least you won't have to fall back on the Sickles.
I've said before that Cowgirls are largely underutilized throughout the game, and I still stand by that, but in this level their spongy nature becomes more of an annoyance once you realize you can avoid dealing with their supersonic rockets entirely by
standing behind a piece of cover and then shooting the Cowgirl through said cover with your Crossbow. They don't move very fast, so in practice this isn't so hard to do. It's just that they take about 10-12 bolts before going down, as behind cover you don't have to worry about any attacks and are just waiting for the Cowgirl to die while holding down LMB. Since you don't get your usual power weapons in this level (the shotty and HR being completely absent, Riveter ammo being very rare for once, and the Mortar being a secret available much later in the level), the Crossbow will be your go-to. But because the time to kill a single Cowgirl with just the Crossbow is so high, it reaches the point where the sponginess just serves to drag the fight out, rather than the sponginess being used in concert with the environment/other enemies to create a unique challenge by having the player face a highly lethal enemy they can't easily delete in a second like they can with the rest. It might have worked out better if the Cowgirls were moved towards the end of the level once you get some better gear, or to give you some extra Riveter ammo to reasonably deal with the Cowgirl without falling to sleep. Or placing a rapid-fire totem to speed things up.
Near the red key there is a clever crack-in-the-wall secret, where the crack is placed right
under an explosive barrel. It reveals a teleporter, which for some reason teleports you into a straight narrow corridor with absolutely no room to strafe or backpedal in on top of three Welders being lined up with the first one being right in your face. Damage is near guaranteed here because of their self-detonation on death, which seems like a hugely bullshit thing to do or just a huge oversight. When you do grab the red key a grated wall will open up in the room you were just in, behind which are those three aforementioned Welders and the passage the secret teleporter leads to. I suppose the assumption here was that the player would naturally grab the red key first and deal with the Welders first, after which you could take the secret teleporter without being obstructed by any enemies. But if you decide to take the secret teleporter first before doing any of these things, you're gonna get shit, even though there's no way for you to know where the teleporter will take you.
The space you're teleported in could have been made wider and the Welders could have not been placed right in your face to fix this. Or by ensuring you're only bound to be able to enter the secret teleporter after dealing with said Welders first, either by placing it in another hidden wall which opens up after you grab the red key, which also contains the aforementioned crack in the floor. Another strange thing is that the secret (aside from a secret blue key) also contains a teleporter which teleports you near the junction which leads between the path you just went through to reach the red key and the path towards the rest of the level where you need to go next. If you miss the secret, it'll involve some unnecessary backtracking along the path to get to that junction again. It's not much, but a teleporter like that seems like something you'd want to have outside a secret. Why heap on unnecessary backtracking on people who missed it? It even gets sillier if you imagine what happens when you take the first teleporter, kill all three Welders without dying yourself, and then taking the teleporter to the starting junction, but without having grabbed the red key first, since the level progression doesn't require you to take it first. It's a bit silly.
There's a neat encounter at the bottom of a pit where you have to deal with several Wizards, a Great Wizard, and a Wendigo in a tight 3x3 tic-tac-toe grid where you have to dodge carefully and uncover the Wendigo before it uncovers you. Unfortunately it is also completely skippable using the blue door one floor above it, by using the secret blue key from the aforementioned teleporter secret. It opens up a room which contains a hole which lets you get the drop on a Cowgirl you would have to face the hard way otherwise. Said room also contains a rapid-fire totem which means dealing with the Cowgirl in this situation isn't as much of a problem as it was with the last one. After killing it you can just drop down the hole and skip the aforementioned encounter, and I think I've said before how I feel about secrets whose reward is letting you play less of the level.
Though this is the second-last level of the episode, things are rather tame. From now on most enemy encounters are just one-on-one, and facing more than three enemies at once becomes a rarity. I'm counting groups of Wizards as a single entity, because in the face of your Crossbow their individual lives are so devoid of value that one Wizard or a handful of Wizards makes no difference to your decision making other than you trying to line up as many of them as possible. At least lining up Crossbow shots never gets old. But up until the end it's all filler encounters which aren't worth elaborating upon. You'd think that the final real level of an episode (not counting the upcoming final one as it's just a boss level) would screw things up a notch, but unfortunately not. Even if it's not a major challenge, it could have at least been a power trip, but there aren't even enough enemies you eviscerate at once for it to be considered a power trip. A finale only really works if there's proper build-up to it, else it just comes out of nowhere or feels like it's petering out. At least narratively the voice in your head drops enough DEEPEST LORE to make it feel like you're uncovering something horrific (like the level name implies). Unfortunately the gameplay is not given the same treatment.
At least the level ends with a boss fight, and... it's 'Son of Intoxigator'. It's literally just Intoxigator from E1M3 again. Your player character even visualizes "AWW COME ON" on screen. Note: self-deprecating jokes don't make the prospect of recycled boss fights more palatable, just like being self-aware about sewer levels being shit does not excuse having shitty sewer levels in the first place. Maybe the stats of Son are a bit different from his dead dad, but the approach you used for his dad still applies because the arena design for this fight is barely any different than when you fought the first Intoxigator. Just stand behind a pillar when he's about to fire, and keep shnooting his shnout. If you found the secret Mortar, then this fight plays out exactly the same way as the MAMA boss fight did in E2M5. It'll take about more than 20 Mortar grenades for it to finally go down while you're repeating the same circlestrafe/move around pillars routine, which is excessive. At least recycling a prior boss would have worked better as a joke if it didn't take so long to kill it.
After that's done you can go hit the level exit switch, except it only makes two Cowgirls appear. At least this fight is trickier by virtue of having to manage two high-profile targets whose attacks have super high projectile speeds, though if you've been saving up Riveter ammo you can quickly delete one before she attacks and then reliably deal with the other. At least this fight could have used some special HP-boosted versions of Cowgirls to account for all that Riveter ammo in the level. Or some extra adds on top of that, like all the Spectres in Doom's final Bruiser Brothers fight at the end of Episode 1 to make it tricker to use your rocket launcher. But generally when in doubt about designing boss fights in games about fighting crowds of enemies at once, just make it a 1v2, as you usually can't just stunlock one guy to death when the other is still on your tail.
That brings us to the final level of this episode,
E2M10, The Gauntlet. You get your Riveter right off the gate so you know shit's about to go down. There's two teleporters leading to two separate areas, in which there are two switches each you need to flick to open the portal to the level exit. Once stepping through either one of them, you'll come to face... The Guardian. I don't even know how to describe its appearance. But it's basically got a Mortar machine gun for an arm and can fill a corridor with grenades. The combat spaces for this fight are very narrow, so once he's about to carpet bomb your ass you want to immediately go to a different lane, as micrododging twenty grenades at once by sliding won't be really effective. And the most interesting part about this fight is: he can teleport! There are points in the level (around the switches) where he can surprise you by teleporting right in your face. Even if you take the teleporter out of one of the two mazes towards the starting area, he'll soon after teleport along with you. You constantly have to madly dash around for Riveter ammo and rapid-fire totems because he can tank a lot of damage, so knowing how to navigate the level is also essential to be able to deal damage to the boss.
The best way to describe this boss fight would be like a first-person Bomberman, except the other guy can teleport, and the only way to win is to pick up all small ammo pickups and power pill items along each path (wait, doesn't that make it more like Pacman?). It's only once I put it that way once I realized how much wasted potential this fight has, because I really like the Bomberman/Pacman arena concept of it a lot, especially when combined with the boss teleporting around. It avoids the usual 'circlestrafe until it dies' problem for other bosses because of the grenade spam and tight arena design, whose small size ensures you have to pick your moments when you can safely shoot at the boss and when it's time to run the hell away. There's no reason to use anything other than the Riveter in this fight until you run out of ammo, but on IM this fight cleverly plays around this by not frontloading you with all the Riveter ammo in the world and forcing you to run around looking for more weapons and ammo in the first place, so there's additional objectives beyond 'shoot at it until it dies'.
It's only disappointing that the teleport ability of the boss is largely scripted. Only if you move over certain parts of the level will he teleport right in front of you, and he'll only teleport once per trigger, which means once you've figured those out can make this fight rather predictable. The slow movement speed of the boss itself also limits how much pressure he can put on you. Once you've exhausted all teleport triggers you can get him to walk down a long corridor as you pop in and out repeatedly to take potshots with the Riveter. It sure would have been more interesting if the boss could teleport more dynamically and more frequently to keep you guessing, kind of like boss fights in Descent (but hopefully with some telegraphing on where he's about to teleport so he doesn't teleport right in front of you without warning). Then expand the size of the mini-mazes, add in three more clones of the same boss with different colors, give them unique behavior, and call them Binky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
Joking aside, the concept of a boss fight like this stands out very much in a game where most boss fights are just matters of running circles around the boss or running the boss around a piece of cover and plinking it to death, though the execution leaves something to be desired. Once the teleport triggers have been exhausted it goes back to your regularly scheduled programming, which is a shame.
To top things off, Episode 2 makes big strides compared to Episode 1 in the fields of pretty much everything. It's the superior episode, no doubt about it. The new enemies open a lot more possibilities in enemy encounter design, and moving on from endless flat spaces is a definite plus. Audiovisually the levels became a lot more creative, and the occasional gimmick helps create some stand-out moments, even if it comes at the cost of replay value at times. However, the dominant strategy that is "run behind a corner and then take potshots as enemies bottleneck themselves" is still too strong and kneecaps many encounters, on top of the game not daring to be more
evil with its level design, instead playing it safe and easy. I wish Episode 2 could have been the first episode somehow, because a lot of responses I've read online give off the impression that they didn't play further than E1 because how boring it was (because it admittedly is).
And that leaves only the third and final episode, where we enter the realms of chaos and fgasdshdhhhhhhhhasd
