Yes, the sky and foliage look very primitive and recent well-known castle maps are in a completely different league. You get very few weapons, which may be frustrating for some. Certain secrets are also ludicrously easy to find.

But there is just so much going on here: exploratory progression, hints in the form of riddles, optical illusions and allusions like in digs06 … If you can look past its somewhat rough exterior, this is a very rewarding map.

Yes, this was kind of fun. Worth three stars, I think. It's easy to forgive crude maps if you feel they're at least making an effort.

Playing on hard, I thought I'd cleared out the level (got all secrets, killed everything I saw), but still only scored 52/63 kills. I wonder where the other 11 monsters are?

MikeTaylor, perhaps the rotfish are to blame? Ok, this is classic Neil Manke. Can be a bit tricky finding all those secrets but it's great fun overall.

Outpost on The Quake Grave

This map is very interesting. Though not as good as his Starship map that he made just a few months later, you could definitely see the potential in Neil's mapping in Outpost.

The puzzley/riddley type things and all the variety in gameplay, like the clues, spider buttons and the strange paintings on the walls, are both a blessing and a curse. I feel like they're cool additions but at the same time they don't seem intuitive to a quake map. However, once I saw what he was trying to do here, it started to work for me. Very unique!

The worst thing about it is it's a little ugly and cramped at times but hey, 1997, what do you want? =)