Nocturne in Yellow

Nocturne in Yellow | NIY.PK3

The Laughing Chamber

This review was originally written in 2019 and has been  heavily edited and updated.

images c/o Mobygames

The greatest thing about Doom is the sheer dedication of the community. For over 30 years, Doom fans have turned the game from the one-time terror of Congress into a springboard for all manner of creative projects. I like to point to the Aliens total conversion a lot when discussing the community's ingenuity and long history, but that project was just the beginning. Doom has been playable on modern PCs for years thanks to the work of the community. Many games of the era have source ports — Quake and its sequel, for example  — but Doom has a ton. Nearly all of them derive from DOSDoom (the coder of which actually coined the term "source port,") though DOSDoom itself was derived from an official Linux port of Final Doom, which served as the basis for id Software's official release of the Doom source code. Anyway, to make a long story short, the most popular source port for all but the most die-hard enthusiasts is the ZDoom family of ports: ZDoom, GZDoom, LZDoom, and UZDoom.

GZDoom began life as an openGL-capable port of ZDoom. (Side note: while there was in fact a GL port that predated GZDoom, (ZDoomGL,) it was way back in the early days and that port is long gone.) ZDoom and its forks are notable for a huge variety of modding tools and engine features, such as colored lighting, sloped surfaces, true 3D floors, the works — and the capabilities have only grown in the last decade and change. In recent years GZDoom seemingly transformed from merely a source port for a 30-year-old game into a modern 2.5D engine unto itself. (You might recognize GZDoom as being the source port of choice for everyone's favorite Klebold and Harris simulator, Brutal Doom. The features GZDoom offers are what makes Brutal Doom's myriad of stolen assets and spaghetti codebase possible.)

ZDoom ceased development over a decade ago; until last year, GZDoom stepped in as the replacement. (These days, GZDoom itself has been deprecated and replaced by UZDoom, but that's a topic for another day.) Many years ago there was an attempt to fork GZDoom into a new, fully GPL-compliant, commercial-friendly port of GZDoom, specifically the now-ancient version numbered 1.8.10. At the time this made sense, because GZDoom itself wasn't GPL-compliant at the time. It's a pretty neat idea, hampered somewhat by the fact that 1.8.10 was already quite deprecated by that point and not likely to see many updates thanks to a desire to make GZDoom work on a wider range of hardware, resulting in the 2.0 release that dropped OpenGL 2.x support. Unfortunately what this means is the rendering code was already showing its age at the time of review.

GLOOME was an experiment, a sort of early step towards the large constellation of GZDoom-powered games now on Steam for real money. A commercial project for GLOOME never materialized because there turned out to never be a real need for it; nevertheless, it's worth looking at one of the original showcase projects, and really the only one of any note. Enter Nocturne in Yellow. Launched shortly after GLOOME's initial release, The Laughing Chamber's weird little fantasy horror mod doesn't really do anything you can't find in mainstream GZDoom (or UZDoom) mods, but it's nonetheless an interesting artifact of an earlier era of the ZDoom family legacy. Made entirely within a single month for the 2015 RPGMaker Indie Game Maker competition, Nocturne in Yellow, while at its core a somewhat mediocre set of maps, nevertheless manages to be a very early attempt at utilizing GZDoom capabilities for horror.

It's 1915 and the Great War is raging. A young Russian librarian prefers to ignore the world falling down around his ears and just stick to his books; one day, however, he happens upon a mysterious tome, the investigation of which eventually leads him to an isolated island in the Black Sea. When he gets there, he sees that it's already populated by shambling zombies, as well as a mysterious woman in black who urges him to go away. He pushes on anyway, working his way deep into a castle as reality slowly begins to unravel. The Lovecraft influence is obvious here, and of course with a name like Nocturne in Yellow you can expect references to everyone's favorite jaundiced sovereign — and indeed, he shows up as the boss of the fifth level.

Presentation-wise, Nocturne in Yellow has a lot to offer. While it's clearly intended for 4:3 resolutions, the character art is really good, used for RPG-style dialogue boxes in the service of the story. I appreciate the sprite design, especially the HUD, which evokes nothing else than Castlevania. The various boss enemies especially are charming in their different personalities, and yes, Hastur's appearance is exactly as scary as you would expect. Sadly, actually fighting him is a pain. And that's really where the game falls down: most of the combat is pretty basic, but bosses are another matter entirely, throwing far too many projectiles your way and taking entirely too much time to bring down. And the King in Yellow is the worst of the lot, appearing only as a faint shadow in a dark room, until he gets near you and suddenly lights up yellow before doing tremendous damage (it's clearly melee as he needs to be near you.) What starts off scary as hell quickly becomes tedious. All this ties in with the game's biggest problem, being that level design is fairly anemic, even amateurish. Functional, but abstract and boring. It's clear that in the rush to get this thing out in a month, The Laughing Chamber focused on the art assets and left level design as an afterthought. But this was many years ago, and speedmapping wasn't as widely practiced as it is today.

I originally wrote the bulk of this review
all the way back in 2019, before I decided
to start doing map-by-map breakdowns.
Some day I may go back to Nocturne In
Yellow and write up its maps, but that day
is not today.

I do love the creepy cosmic horror vibe. The island and castle feel alien in that way that only old FPS games with under-detailed levels can do. It's like stepping into a twisted mirror of what you know the world looks like. I'd like to see more work in this thematic vein, though ideally in an engine that isn't a deprecated, buggy mess. I don't know if it was the old render code or my computer, but I had frequent moments where the game would just freeze for a second.

Nocturne in Yellow, in short, is a showcase for a project that offers something no longer necessary. And yet, while GLOOME may have fallen short of its goals, it was a good idea, and in the eight years since its release, GZDoom and its successor UZDoom has become a promising engine for a community that has never stopped being amazingly creative. Go on Steam and you'll find games like Hedon, Hands of Necromancy, Supplice, the amazing Selaco, and more. We've come a long way, baby.

One last thing: TerminusEst13, the project lead, has written up a post-mortem, which you can read here.

-june❤