Really cool and fun, love the horde battles on hard. But there's a weird way to sequence break if you get to the secret area with the red armor from the first landing of the spiral staircase after the gold key door... just saying.

hell yeeeah! now this is good stuff! at first i didn't think i was gonna like it; i think there should have been just a little more restraint in the very beginning. not because it was overwhelming or too hard, it actually wasn't at all, but just because it felt unnatural and forced somehow. i think maybe just a little bit of corridor combat leading into the main exterior area would have gone a long way to setting the stage. after this minor misstep however, the action very quickly finds a wonderful tempo, and this really was very fun and exciting. very doomish. i think this may be slightly underrated actually.

Wow. There are levels with better architecture, or more atmosphere, or a more coherent narrative than this, but I doubt there are levels that are more FUN than this. I'd forgotten what a blast it was to smash your way through horde after horde of relatively low-powered enemies (or, later on, high-powered ones). With ammo and health never in short supply, some would call this map unbalanced. I didn't care. It was awesome. Jumps straight into my all-time top half-dozen maps. And need I say, 5/5.

I just played straight through this again. Love love love it!

There are a couple of places where I hit switches, then the doors of the room I'm in lock; then unlock again after a second or two and I'm free to go. It feels as though waves of monsters are meant to spawn in, and I should have to fight them to progress, but they never come. It's the sort of misbehaviour that I've sometimes seen when I've played Quoth maps without Quoth, but this is not a Quoth map. (And yes, I remembered the -hipnotic command-line argument.) Is anyone else seeing this?

Just played through on nightmare, in case the monsters only spawn in at that level. Nope. Still those odd moments of press a switch, doors close, wait, doors open.

Also, the penultimate horde that materialises on the plain at the very top of the map only sometimes seems to come: it arrived on my first play-though, but not on the second or third. I have no idea why. Anyone? It left me with an unsatisfying 249/259 monsters.

Anyway, none of these bugs detract from how awesomely playable this map is. I stand right behind my 5/5 score.

Nightmare never adds any monsters or items that aren't there already

I know Nightmare monster counts are always the same as Hard. I wondered if there was a teleporting trigger that only fired in Nightmare.

Video with commentary

NOTE: use the revised release of Masque instead of this one: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/masque_final.html

It fixes the bug I mentioned when no monsters teleport in.

This goes onto my top 10 of all-time favorites. The brushwork is great and texturing spot-on as well. The game balance was just right, IMO for skill 2, but the main and most important positive attribute about Masque is that it's solid fun.

I also advise installing the revised game file from: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/masque_final.html

I tried the old one and ran into several problems that the final fixes.