lilith.pk3

The Sky May Be gets called the worst WAD ever, while this is feted with awards... What the hell's wrong with this community!?

Kidding.

After so many years of refinement and improvement in editors' skills, a lot of Doom maps are so exquisitely crafted that it's almost too much. Like admiring some ornate Gothic church, there's a part of your brain that rebels against the perfection on display, and wants something messier and uglier. Lilith.pk3 is, in its own way, just as intricately made as those other maps, except the craft is directed towards making something more experimental, corrupted and obtuse. Sprites, textures, music and sounds are all heavily modified, and engine bugs leveraged, to create the impression of a game world that is twisted and wrecked beyond repair. That player must navigate through a colourfully discordant environment that both does and does not conform to their expectations of a typical Doom game.

The mod's aesthetic is not totally unprecedented, either in Doom modding, wider gaming, or art in general. Glitch art, as the style is known, has enjoyed some success over the past few years, purposefully employing the kind of analogue and digital corruption that occasionally affects regular media for stylistic effect. The same criticism that could be levelled at glitch might also be raised here: that it is style over substance. When you strip away the confrontational aesthetic, is there anything left? E.g. would you play these levels if they were presented in a more conventional manner?

I would argue that, on balance, there is. While the gameplay is not quite as daring or original as the presentation it's wrapped up in, there are some cool ideas there. And the aesthetic is used to enhance these ideas, not disguise them. Towards the end, it does become a little needlessly frustrating, as the player must dance around moving and frozen projectiles over a series tiny platforms in a damaging floor. After reloading for the umpteenth time, you may wonder exactly why you're bothering to continue. But overall, lilith.pk3 admirably achieves what it sets out to do, and is well worth your time. Even if it ultimately turns you off, we should be glad that the Doom community still produces work as different and challenging as this.

For as long as I've been playing Doom (around 10 years now), I've only been truly excited by a small number of things from this community. Things such as Alien Vendetta, when I was first starting to dabble in pWADs. I had no idea Doom could be like that. Back to Saturn X: Episode 1 - the mapset that directly influenced me to really take an interest in mapping myself. UAC Ultra, which to me felt like the first Perfect Doom Experience™ I had come across. Yet another is Cold as Hell, which was the first ZDoom mapset that really made me think about Doom Modding as something that is Doom, but also as something beyond just a collection of maps with (maybe) some additional resources thrown in. lilith.pk3 is the latest and, for me, perhaps the most exciting of all. It's the first mapset I've played that treated Doom not just as a modifiable game, or as a base in which to create custom levels for, but something that specifically called on the relationship I had with gaming, and the prior knowledge I had of Doom, to further add to my own playing experience. The sheer unpredictability of the mod made it so that - for only the second time* in the past few years - I felt genuinely vulnerable and tense while playing a Doom mod. Just like how I felt when I was a kid, when I always felt that visceral, nervous thrill of trying to play the original Doom maps. lilith.pk3's treatment of the resources (the subtle changes to monster and action behaviour, along with its changes to things such as songs) were the first time I'd seen changes made to Doom where the intention was not to please me or make me feel powerful, but instead to unsettle me as a player, to make me feel uncomfortable.

This reason is why I feel lilith.pk3 truly deserved a Cacoward. Whenever I load up a mapset, it doesn't enter my mind that I might experience something other than that same old feeling I get when I usually play Doom: the desire to kill things, to beat the map, and to enjoy whatever sights the modder may have worked away at to present me with. This is the experience I have with 99.99~% of WADs. This isn't a problem, and I'd hate for things to change too much - I mean, I play Doom because it's a great game! I don't want that great game to go away any time soon! As the same time: I'm an artist. I'm an appreciator of art. I seek out new and unorthodox things to expand my horizons, to make me reconsider how I create and take in other artistic works, and to hopefully influence my own artistic process for the better. I feel that every artist - even those who have found their artistic voice and are happy in their current artistic situation - is letting themselves down if they choose to stick with what they're comfortable with, to not expose themselves to new and unusual pieces of artistic expression when the opportunity presents itself.

There are a lot of content creators now in this community, and the natural outcome of this larger collection of modders is that we will have more content to play. This is good. The most important thing for a community of artists is that not only do we have a growth of actual artists, but also a growth of the ways in which we can express our ideas. lilith.pk3 opens the door for content creators to think of Doom modding not just as configuring and piecing together resources (monsters, textures, music, etc.) into a new set of maps, but to encourage us to develop and consider our relationships, as players, to the content already available to us. By relationships, I specifically mean the relationship between us and our knowledge of prior Doom content, and our experiences with what currently exists in the community. Using map 03 of lilith.pk3 as an example, take the reference to The Gantlet, where the player is briefly shown a snippet of a wholly perfect and clean Map 03, before being dragged back into the glitch-filled monstrosity they must fight through. It references The Gantlet not just for reference's sake, but to specifically make us aware of our situation as a person playing a mapset that is much more alien to us than a typical Doom mod - it juxtaposes our sense of the familiar with the overwhelming unfamiliar that we are experiencing throughout this gameplay experience. This is just one example, and it is an example using only the stock resources. With the massive amount of user-made material now existing in the community, the new design space that this kind of design theory opens up can be massive. I say with full sincerity, on the back of this realisation, that lilith.pk3 may be one of the most important WADs released to the community so far.

Does that mean I want another lilith.pk3? Or that I want some kind of trend in mapping towards the glitchy mapset or whatever? No. As much as I really enjoyed lilith.pk3, I've mostly had my fill of it at this point. What I actually want to see - going forward - is more content in the spirit of lilith.pk3. More content that explores the relationship I have as a player with the content I take in when I play Doom. I want intertextuality. I want content that makes me think about the worlds I explore whenever I load up a pWAD, content that allows me to have more visceral and surprising sensations whenever I play Doom. I'm not saying that I will be disappointed with future mapping endeavours that choose to not take these things into consideration, because the things I'm describing aren't the be-all and end-all of future Doom modding. It's probably a new (and not particularly exciting) idea to a lot of people in the community, and at the end of the day we're here first and foremost to play Doom and have fun. When it comes to content creation there are a ton of things that I've not yet experimented with in the community, so I'm in no position to judge other people on what they choose to do with a game that at this point is now 24 years old. However, this idea of intertextuality is something that can absolutely join the mapping brain space of a modder when they sit down to create a new project. Aesthetics. Gameplay style. Choice of source port. The balance of modern vs. classic old school feel, or the balance between realism vs. the abstract. These are the things we broadly think about when we sit down to start a new idea. lilith.pk3 shows us that our project's relationship with the other content that exists around us can also influence how we create our work. I'm very excited by the idea of future projects possibly taking these ideas into account and making a richer, more fulfilling Doom experience in the coming years.

* The other time was Nihility. That shit was scary, folks.

Eyesore, and gets repetitive real quick, yet gets a Cacoward? what a joke? Modern art man..... just another reason why we need the "people"s choice" award, sorry anotak nothing personal.

What starts as a neat idea just becomes tiring and irritating after the first couple maps. This wad is honestly just a joke that overstays its welcome.

I would've rated this 5/5 if it wasn't for the permanent brain damage it caused me.

This is certainly one of the greatest WADs ever released. Someone above me suggested it's an inside joke, I don't really agree, it's much more than a joke, or perhaps it's a joke that plays itself till the end, with full consequences of its setup.

At first it's like, oh, so everything is glitchy and warped and barely recognizable? Yes, it is. You play it for a few minutes, marvelling at the author's persistence to modify nearly every Doom II asset. It's weird, but fun.

Then you start noticing small touches of genius. Incredible architecture feats. Dynamic changes to the layout - it's not Build, is it? Surprising uses of hall of mirrors and crystal sectors, and probably more.

And then something finally clicks in your brain, you adapt into this new environment. Each room becomes a puzzle with different rules, you try to identify the problem - which way is it? How to get there? The mod ruthlessly pulls the rug from under your feet, and you fall into endless void of repeated textures, just to land into room where everything seems to be living spasmatically. You don't consider this weird anymore, yet still can't entirely trust your senses. Monster desperately follow their in-game logic despite everything acting like there's somewhere a huge electromagnet mutating every byte inside your hard drive.

It's way more different than anything I've seen made for Doom, or possibly any other game. Thus, it's one of the greatest WADs ever released.

Take my five star rating with a grain of salt:

If you're here for your regular old shootem up WAD, then check elsewhere.

This WAD is the 11/4 key signature of DOOM levels.  This is "wut" in the most wonderful way. 

It's an inside joke you won't get unless you've spent hundreds/thousands of hours here with us.  

You ever seen a hall of mirrors effect work like an actual hall of mirrors?  You ever see the Doom Guy's face do that before?

You will get crusher'd into another dimension.

This WAD will take you into the basement and do stuff to you.

Just download this.  Do yourself a favor and check out the different "Quit to DOS" screens the author added as well.

wtftastic