Corrupted Cistern

 

Corrupted Cistern | CIS-LUTZ.WAD

Chris Lutz

I don’t really have a big list of Doom wad authors whose work I obsessively follow. After an initial period of being active between 2000–2004 I kind of fell out of touch with the scene outside of getting into fights in Doomworld’s Everything Else subforum and picking one or two things to play from each year’s Cacowards. As such my primary frame of reference is always going to be what I consider the “golden age” of Doom mapping, 1999 to 2003 (give or take a year.) As such there’s one wad author whose work I immediately think of when trying to think who my favorite mappers might be: Chris Lutz. I was introduced to him via the fantastic one-two punch of Caverns of Darkness and Phobos: Anomaly Reborn; I’ve been a fan of his mapping output ever since. But those two projects were over two decades ago, and as impressive as they are, they don’t hold a candle to the visual splendor of Corrupted Cistern, his big 2022 release and honorable mention at that year’s Cacowards.

The usual disclaimer: I played through this map using GMOTA 1.5.2, using Lord Blaz, as well as the Equippable Torch mod, and the Retro FX Dither shader. I didn’t set the sector light mode to “dark” because the torch mod tanked my framerate in some spots, especially anything with water.

Cistern started out, humbly enough, as Lutz trying to learn Ultimate Doom Builder and the UDMF map format and their capabilities. What began as a series of experiments evolved into a cohesive map, with the Na Pali water temples from Unreal explicitly cited as an influence but I see traces of Quake and Thief, myself; that’s leaving aside the mostly Mesoamerican-style textures that I recognize as coming directly from Hexen II, though the classic Ancient Aliens mapset is also credited as a texture source.

The basic conceit is a large underground water system, a series of tunnels connecting gloomy chambers and vast caverns. Some of these grand rooms have trees growing in them, nourished by the faint light filtering in from high above; water drips in here and there, vines hang from cracks in the ceiling. The cistern itself is multi-tiered, with stairways built out of suspended platforms held up by metal arms hanging off poles. While the tunnels are full of bad guys, it’s the bigger rooms that pose the greater challenge, capable of holding larger groups, including fliers and other nasties.

The open-ended nature of Corrupted Cistern is probably its greatest strength. The whole thing turns into a bit of an adventure as monsters roam the tunnels and wander into rooms, meaning you can meet fresh resistance in a place you thought you’d already cleared; the maze-like tunnels never feel particularly safe as baddies come at you from all directions. It can be dangerous to poke your head too far into unexplored territory, lest you invite further trouble. The bigger fights are pretty hair-raising, from dealing with a swarm of fliers in the large cavern with the hanging lift while more bad guys come in from the nearby room, or the horde of barons and a cyberdemon lording over the red key you need to get out in a huge flooded chamber towards the end.

What makes Corrupted Cistern so great, besides gameplay that (love it or hate it) is pure Lutz, is its strong sense of place. Lutz uses careful texture placement and use of both sector lighting and dynamic lights to create a gloomy, watery scene that is just beautiful to behold. If I didn’t know better I would have thought I was playing a Quake map, only Quake maps aren’t usually this colorful. There’s a lot to the level that feels like an old-school dungeon crawler, though the excellent use of color and light and shadow remind me also of Thief II: the Metal Age, or at the very least some of the better-looking fan missions for it.

Chris Lutz has had a long and storied career in Doom mapping; it’s my hope that Corrupted Cistern isn’t so much a magnum opus as it’s a sign of things to come.

 

 

 

 

get it on /idgames

 

-june❤

 

Swimming the same deep water as you is hard
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