Games with That One Exceptional Level?

[Manjuice Nutella]

The following is a no-brainer level, but I liked the upper floors of the Cathedral in Fallout 1.

Sierra Madre in Fallout: New Vegas. The pacing and little details in the backstory. That melancholia. Fuck yeah.

Woodside & Blue Creek Apartments in Silent Hill 2.

While we're at horrors, that already mentioned beginning of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth in Innsmouth. The atmosphere was amazing. Although, to digress, this has to be one of those few times when I strongly disagree with the general Kodex Konsensus since the game is pretty bad and everything decent in it is mostly beneficiary of the great base material. After the aforementioned Esoteric Order Attack the feeling of danger and suspense is for the most part gone as soon as you get a weapon, and the game disgracefully devolves into popping endless waves of moles with braindead AI and stormtrooper accuracy at point blank range. And probably most of all, this retarded protagonist, oblivious of everything around him, who can't piece together A with B and undermines the entire experience with one of the probably poorest examples of writing in video games in his monologues and interludes.

Spoiler

Yeah.

As for the harmless protagonist in beginning levels before shit hits the fan, I really liked the prison in that Riddick game, Escape from Butcher Bay. I can't think without my injector.

Ibidem, the first city level in Atlantis: The Lost Tales. The Red Rooster Inn had me shitting my pants with fear when I was a kid. And Ireland in Atlantis 2

Aside for the iconic Artorias the Abysswalker, in the context of the build-up; Anor Londo

Spoiler

after dark.

in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. The game was full of little hints and subtleties about the whole scheme and machinations involving the role of player in the setting, but this level is the exemplifier of it next to Darkstalker Kaathe in how it truly turns the tables once you piece the elements together. Truly the Torment of action RPGs.

 

[Flanged]

The Crypt in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the one that you finally get to the zombies. From the opening cutscene, it manages to establish all that made that game wonderful. The Nazi occultism, protraying your average Third Reich soldier as just that, another simple human soldier. Great variation in enemies.

I preffered Paderborn Village. Just a great atmosphere, nice Northern European evening light, more stealth than combat - a change from the rest of the game - and the somewhat (slightly) varied assassinations of all those high-ranking Nazi occultists that Himmler had stationed there.

One of the things that stands out is that you twice (if I remember right) come upon Nazis who are just listening to music and enjoying it, unaware of your presence. One of them is drunk and singing along raucously in the cellar of a pub, the other (a creepy occultist) is alone in his house listening to Wagner or something and reading/conducting an experiment/ritual. They are slightly humanised before you shoot or knife them from behind. I don't remember it all exactly, but the whole level left a big sense-impression on me.

Just found a vid of it, turns out I remembered a lot of it wrong. Still looks great though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAITdABEiTs

 

[skacky]

I think Thief has been covered pretty well so far, almost every level is a masterpiece so I'm not going to discuss it any further.

Fallout: The Glow, definitely. Eerie and soothing music with a very dangerous radioactive environment. No enemies except inert robots when the aux. power is online. Creepy as fuck. The Brotherhood of Steel's compound is also particularly awesome. Junktown is also awesome for all the possibilities you have to fuck everything up.
STALKER: The Chernobyl NPP with the Monolith talking to you. Both X18 and X16 are also very good.
Unreal: Bluff Eversmoking. The Skaarj Mothership is also pretty fun and features amazing architecture and style.
Quake: Gloom Keep and Ziggurat Vertigo are my favorite levels, the former because it's brutal and the latter because it's completely bizarre.
Dishonored: High Overseer Campbell's mission just reeks of atmosphere in a very good way.
Half-Life: Xen. Yeah, Xen. I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed the fuck out of it.
System Shock: The Security level with all the flying robots and the superb music. The bridge that comes just after is a stark contrast and is creepy as hell.
System Shock 2: Engineering, with the radioactive hazard and the trippy music.
VtM: Bloodlines: I really have a soft spot for Santa Monica. Great atmosphere, especially when it rains.
Arx Fatalis: The crypt. I had huge Thief throwbacks when I arrived in this forsaken place. It's nowhere near as scary as RTTC but it gets the job done in terms of ambiance. Also, the dwarven level.

 

[sea]

It's a fairly atmospheric part of the game the first time you go through it. Second time you go back, and from every subsequent replay onwards, it becomes that one area in the game where you can't die, nothing bad can happen to you, and have to do some awkward first person platforming and manoeuvring.

Yep. It scared the shit out of me the first time through, I admit it; it's such a cheesy haunted house in the most literal sense, yet it's so effective as well. Afterwards it's just kind of a chore, though it still makes me jump from time to time because I'll inevitably forget one of the jump scares.

 

[DemonKing]

Some of these have been mentioned, but what the hell:

Half-Life: Surface Tension. There was something kinetic about this level. Often when I play single player games I am fairly measured and take me time slowly advancing to make sure I don't miss anything but this level just gets you in a rhythm where you are blazing away in time with the soundtrack - the pacing is *that* good.

Call of Duty 4: All Ghillied Up. The COD series was already wildly popular in its WW2 skin so I was a little trepeditious about how it would transition to a modern setting but you have to say they absolutely nailed it from both a multi- and single-player perspective (although it's been overshadowed somewhat by the fact the series has since been annualised ala a lot of sports' titles). This level was the cream of the crop - great voice acting and atmosphere and it broke the usual COD level-design mode which spewed respawning enemies at you until you moved past an invisible check point.

Battlefield 2: Strike at Karkund. A multiplayer level to be sure but one that got rid of the pesky planes and helicopters that so many players loved to spawn-camp while leaving their team mates to do the heavy lifting on the ground, this one is perfect for it's tightly focused urban combat zone which balanced out vehicles and foot soldiers well.

Commandos 2: Target: Burma. I actually probably prefer Commandos 3 overall as the controls for Commandos 2 were just a little too fiddly for my taste, but there were so many great levels in Commandos 2 I have to give it its due. This was probably my favourite - so many different approaches to take and you could actually swim in under the fortifications as well as taking the more obvious routes, plus you could kill the enemy general at the end by a number of different approaches. Let's hope a true sequel appears one of these days.

IceWind Dale: The Severed Hand. Magnificent art, a wonderful "dungeon" concept, interesting environments (who didn't love going through that area transition and finding the remains of that tower floating in place) and a fascinating backstory to discover if you dug deep enough.

Thief the Dark Project: Down in the Bonehoard. I get why some people prefer the levels with human guards or the creepy otherworldliness of some of Thief's other levels but for pure atmosphere and sound design this is my favourite Thief level. You really do feel like you are descending into the catacombs here.

 

[MisterStone]

I remember that Bungie's Myth 2 had a lot of awesome levels. That was the great thing about that game, they always managed to stretch the limits of gameplay with intelligent and innovative level design. Some of the ones I remember are when you have to defend a stone circle from a bunch of marrauding barbarians at night, the one where you have to play capture the flag with the giants, the one where you hold back a huge horde of monsters trying to storm a library... the game was LONG but it never got old, at least that's how I recall it.

Ultima 5's underworld was awesome. Back in those days I was used to everything in a game being in the official manual, but when you went into the underworld, which had a completely unmapped new world map, new monsters, new locations, etc. everthing was mysterious and exciting. I remember coming across a tower there and then realizing that it was a beached ship! Also, weird critters that swallow you and drag you underground, etc. COol stuff.

The first Wasteland had good areas, in particular I remember Vegas and the Citadel.