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| Playing The Hotel - Lost Contact by blackwater 01/21/2024, 11:23pm PST | ||||
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| Another Doom WAD inspired by the Backrooms. This apparently existed in a half-finished state for many years, but now it exists in a whole-finished state. Or something. So if you see any docs about a shitty older version, you can ignore them.
It has a surprising amount of content. Full heads-up-display rework. Totally different weapon set than the base game. A VHS static filter (for some of the later levels), because it's the Backrooms and we have to have that. The framing story is something about a SWAT team clearing drug dealers out of a hotel. It's... ok. Clearly English isn't the author's first language. The authors did a really good job creating a horror aesthetic on the old Doom engine. It's not so much the jump scares (although there are a few of those) but the overall sound and video design, which I found surprisingly good. The enemies are really brutal. I played this on Normal, and on the first level, there is an enemy that killed me in one hit. Oh, and it's fast, too. The only way to kill it was to empty like two full clips from the automatic rifle into it, while sprinting backwards. So while the game gives you a lot of ammo, you never really feel safe. I kind of like the feeling that things are dangerous -- adds to the horror atmosphere -- but don't like the save scumming it inevitably leads to. I wonder if GZDoom made some of these enemies too hard. I liked the enemies that disappear and reappear. They were a bit more of a fair challenge, while still being hard to hit. And also the enemies that do nothing except disrupt your vision. A cool idea. There is a lot of variety. It's kind of funny to be fighitng Slenderman one moment (not literally, he is not in this game, but you know what I mean) and then the next you're facing a regular human mook that goes down with one shotgun blast. There is a lot of running away, and that is as it should be. Although there were some sections where it was possible to clear them out, which kind of cuts against the backrooms ambiance. The Poolrooms section was a highlight. It always is for me in these games... what can I say. Some of the later levels seemed virtually unplayable without opening the cheats console. There was one where I'm pretty sure the yellow key was hidden behind a yellow door. Either this was a "noclip" reference or there was a bug somewhere and a door didn't open that was supposed to. There was another one where I had to run through an epic horde of monsters and I had no ammo. That was probably beatable fairly, but... nah, bro. Overall, I'd give this a thumbs up. |
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Playing The Hotel - Lost Contact by 01/21/2024, 11:23pm PST  |
