TDM FM Review: House in Blackbog Hollow

This is a review of one of The Dark Mod’s (a mod for Doom 3) fan missions. It may contain traces of spoilers. You have been warned.

Author(s): stumpy
Version: 1.0
Date released: 2011-10-29
Other info: Halloween Speed Build Contest 2011 entry
Theme: Builder/Haunted
Download FM here

Stumpy has made two missions in the past – neither of which I enjoyed much, to be honest. But “House in Blackbog Hollow” (which I will from now on refer to as HIBH – not a rude word) is mostly better than said missions. In case you’re wondering – the missions I speak of are “Lord Dufford’s” and “Illusionist’s Tower”.

You start off on the streets hidden away in an alley of sorts, and make your way in to the large area ahead. You’ve got two patrolling guards here but they’re easy to avoid. First thing you’ll notice is the large black house – more on this later. The mission is to grab some ancient treasure outside a warehouse nearby. But it turns out it’s not that simple: some bastard got there first and nabbed it – and he’s hiding in the house you couldn’t help but notice earlier.

I managed to enter the place after several minutes of mucking about; missing the obvious way in. After seeing a pumpkin kill a nobleman sitting at a table, I knew I was in for something else. From then on, I was wary of every bloody pumpkin I came across. I tried shooting them with arrows, or slicing them with swords – to no avail.

And there were spiders, too. Very large, patrolling spiders. This mission pretty much has everything scary you could possibly want in a mission. Never mind zombies – they’ve got nothing on seemingly invincible pumpkins.

Stumpy pulls some tricks similar to the ones seen in “Illusionist’s Tower”. Upon entering the house, it grows larger than initially thought. It’s positively massive with several floors to explore. There’s some interesting illusions besides this, such as walls that can actually be walked through to reach the corridor behind. It wouldn’t have been so obvious if it hadn’t been for the spiders, that basically showed me it was possible in the first place. Otherwise I’m sure it might have stumped (no pun intended) a few people. There’s also a crying baby, which turns out… not to be. Rather creepy, that part.

 

Hover mouse over pictures for captions, if available.

There aren’t any guards anywhere, but you’ll come across some corpses every now and again – these are supposedly the people who lived here before the curse came along. I won’t spoil it too much for you, so that’s all I’m saying.

After some looking around, you reach the study near the top of the mansion and discover that there’s more to the pumpkins than you originally thought. The pumpkins you avoided earlier actually need to be collected and taken to a temple beneath the surface. They need to be used to end a curse that resulted due to the mansion being built on top of the temple. Sounds similar to the old “house that was built on top of a sacred Indian burial ground” cliché, but nonetheless. That’s what we were all expecting to come out of this competition: clichés.

So we went from trying to retrieve the treasure to helping end the curse.

The mission was enjoyable in the end. Stumpy pulled out the usual tricks; some new, and others old. From what I can tell, he’s not as amateurish as I thought he was initially and has shown that with some general messing around in DarkRadiant, he can put a decent, and sometimes challenging map together. But this mission is his best so far, because it doesn’t stray too far from the norm as far as a TDM mission goes. The level design isn’t anything too special, but it is a step up from the likes of Lord Dufford’s large, empty, uninteresting rooms. The soundtrack that accompanies the FM consists of some new tracks, as well as some old ones with a twist.

Lord Dufford’s was an average at best mission for several reasons among which included some gameplay faux pas that could have been avoided with some beta testing. That and it was a bit too loony for my liking. And Illusionist’s Tower was too frustrating – it tried to be overly technical. This mission is a sort of happy medium, or balance between the expected and outrageous. It’s not too challenging, and the best bit of the FM will be the story, more than likely, which isn’t bad.

Overall the FM is unconventional, rather wacky, but for this Halloween Speed Build Contest – it works; almost perfectly.

Pros:

+ Good story.

Cons:

-  Not that challenging.

FM score: 8.8/10