other levels at least give you a key to a door buried in some secret. the game is not just mocking you for thinking that a key that you just picked up directly across the way would be the correct one to open the locked door. This would be an interesting area in itself, but the most peculiar thing about it is that you're given a dummy key. that is indeed the case, as several officers are tucked away in alcoves at the side the player enters and come running the moment the key is picked up. despite not actually emitting any light, they seem to burn down on the player, suggesting something troubling. instead, he finds the silver key! this room, pictured at the very beginning of this article, is covered by a grid of lights, a dreamlike pattern that also never reappears in the game. He opts to go through 7 anyway (at 2:55), i guess looking for secrets. he has the right key, and doesn't need to enter room 7 at all. 7b, on the left, is the gold key door that i mentioned previously, and leads straight to the exit. the last, immediately to his left, leads to a T-shaped hall that ends on either side of the T with rooms 7 and 7b. one is the door at point 2, which in a confusing circle leads back to the beginning room. from where he enters on the side of room 4, two of the doors are just more storage rooms, with ammo, health, and a guard or two. this level contributes to that idea in just a few bits of surreal imagery.įor the sake of convenience, here's another look at the map. the player in the video either remembers this level, or makes yet another lucky choice when he picks the door to the right. what may look like a design troll on the surface often has a much more complicated effect on the player.
WOLFENSTEIN 3D MAPS EPISODE 1 LEVEL 4 HOW TO
more importantly, though, suggesting that all design must follow an established set of rules of "fairness" to the player would completely ignore its power to communicate more abstract, complex feelings than just how to reach the exit.
those may not seem like much now, but at the time being able to save anywhere was a luxury. Wolf 3D even does this to an extent by letting you save at any point in any level and giving you the choice opt out of a particular episode you don't like and choose to play another one. certainly fairness is very important if you want the player to feel in control of a situation. that seems to be a dominant philosophy in a lot of game design theory, and one that i'm trying my best to stay as far away from as humanly possible. Here i think it would be easy to dismiss some of the design decisions made in the later part of this game as poorly thought-out relics of an older style of game design. though looking back, i think having the rug constantly pulled out from under you makes this episode a lot more representative a depiction of the fevered, all-encompassing cruelty of the Nazi regime than previous ones. Brenda Brathwaite, when she absurdly quipped off-the cuff that Wolfenstein was about the Holocaust in a talk in her "One Falls For Each Of Us" series, might actually have been onto something. the effect this has on you as a player is definitely disorienting. many odd chances are taken, design-wise, and some work much more effectively than others. this is where you can see Tom Hall, the designer of all of episode 4 (and a majority of the Wolfenstein's maps in general), starting to shift away from trying to make realistic-feeling environments, and move towards a kind of a surreal farce on his previous realistic levels. in a way, i was right, but the episode also makes many so left turns and breaks design taboos the game went to a lot of effort to previously establish that it's impossible to categorize. at the time i didn't like that feeling, so i guessed that it must be representative of what was to come. looking at the level now, the way both of those passages are introduced with bright lights seems almost too perfectly surreal. the mazes are short, but they seem to already put you in a couple agonizingly claustrophobic situations.
WOLFENSTEIN 3D MAPS EPISODE 1 LEVEL 4 SERIES
after a pretty entrance room, it wastes no time in plunging you into a series of bland winding passages to get the gold key and exit. I intially ignored episode 4 because of the relatively uninviting first level.
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