Many of the levels are unique. I especially liked the remake of the original level of the game in the style of concrete from "stickflip" and the level from "strideh". Well done.

QuakeInjector says: "Couldn't open file! invalid compression method"

Oh yikes, I can confirm that and filed a bug report: https://github.com/hrehfeld/QuakeInjector/issues/146

As a workaround you could unpack the downloaded file and re-zip it. That might just solve it.

Being a fan of modernist architecture, this was a treat. The textures are mindblowing. The architecture on three of the maps and the start area is very impressive. This jam is huge and as all jams has a mix of good, bad and ugly. Generally most maps in jams are either good at architecture and crap at gameplay or the other way round, one or two gets both right and a few get both wrong. This is not helped by copper which IMO makes things worse and not better but in spite of the crapness of copper, a total of four maybe five maps for me are worth playing - I will not list them all but I want to single out Rabbit's map which for me is 5/5 on both scores. Rabbit claims this is his/her first map - this is astounding - they have put all the more experienced mappers on this jam to shame. The little note at the end about them not being able to finish the map? What? Really? If they finished it, it would have been one of the best maps ever made. Period. I hope that they go back and do a v2 as a stand alone. Maybe tag on a few more for a campaign? The modernist look is spot on and gameplay is both varied, interesting, the proper level of hard (I always play 2 and it drives me nuts when mappers can't tell the difference between hard and hell mode)

Quakespasm for mac can't unzip it

Quakespasm for mac can't unzip it

Interesting that someone found Rabbit's map to be a 5/5, when in my case it was one of the worst balanced ones in so many ways I basically tried only 2 times to play it and then moved on. Each to their won I guess.

Well, this is good.

New mappers, old hands... all with some good ideas, and a interesting take on concrete!

Maps range - as usual in these compilations - from, well, mediocre to excellent. But each and every one is playworthy!

All of you: well done. And thanks for sharing!

Rabbit: best brutalist concrete architecture I ever saw in a quake map. But I'm stuck in the silver key room and can't find a way to proceed. When I avoid this room, I can't find doors for the silver and gold key.

Mazu: great, really fun to explore - as always with his maps.

Bonn: a museum, I think. Designed after a real one?

Best from the rest: I'm still checking.

Rating 5, of cause, for this innovative map bundle.

Thanx ! so much fun with this, as always. Ludicrous

Wow. Another great Jam with some unbelievable ideas brought to life.

Beautiful textures and brushwork throughout, and some insanely good gameplay.

I had a lot of fun playing these and I think Rampage made me laugh the most because of how insane it got at times. It reminded me of the original L4D in a few ways.

Thanks to the Brutalist Jam team for your hard work and for sharing with us!

Finished zbidou on second attempt, skill 0, kills 160/161 and secrets 6/8. Fully satisfying. Thanx again.

On Unijorse's map I have 33/33 kills and closed door with message "kill the bastards first". Who else I need to kill?

On my opinion the most integesting gameplay and exploring is on Mazu's map. But Exhudson's map has the most beautifil architecture

Did someone find the double shotgun on the Rabbit's map?

"Did someone find the double shotgun on the Rabbit's map?"

I couldn't.

And also, as I have written above:

"But I'm stuck in the silver key room and can't find a way to proceed."

When I shoot or hack the computer, the door with the nailgun (and the fiend) opens, but the exit door closes. No way to open it. Or do I overlook something.

And so: no nailgun.

It's the question: is this intended by author, maybe as secret, or a mistake in the map.

Anyway: interesting :-)

Cheers, ludicrous

Does anyone have the older version of Concrete Citadel? The "updated" version's exit doesn't work. AFAIK, its the only map in the set that can't be finished without noclip.

i think there may have been an issue with the targetnames on difficulties other than normal on Concrete Citadel

Mentions copper but doesn't include copper. Can't open main menu using Esc or Start button on controller. Am using Quake Remastered.

man... I haven't even finished all the maps on the first floor and this is awesome. thanks to all who made this jam this is bada$$... 5/5

Er ... am I missing something in Peculiar Investigation (qbj_hrnekbezucha) or is that it? Walk down a gangway, across an atrium and up a spiral staircase, pick up a piece of paper, retrace your steps?

Hmm, no. I can see from noclipping that there is more — a lot more — but I have no idea how to access the bits behind the gold- and silver-key doors. The keys don't seem to be in the director's office. What am I missing?

MikeTaylor, rot13 spoilers: Qba'g gbhpu gur ercbeg ba gur qrfx -- gung jvyy or vagrecergrq nf "fvtavat bss" ba gur fgngr bs gur snpvyvgl naq abg orvat phevbhf. V guvax lbh pna ybbx sbe gur xrl lbh arrq nf ybat nf lbh unira'g gbhpurq gur ercbeg.

Scoured Revelations (qbj_qalten) is a series of set-pieces in a rather bland concrete complex, each of them fairly satisfying, complemented by a couple of timing puzzles where the allowed time is tight but not unreasonable. I enjoyed each part of this, but without ever feeling anything especially memorable was happening.

@Johnny Law, thank you!

Well, Peculiar Investigation is certainly interesting — a welcome change of pace from other Quake maps — but unless I am still missing something important, having explored both silver-key areas has still left me unsure of exactly what's happened, and whether I'm missed something. At any rate, the promised monster count of 0 seems to be adhered to.

I also enjoyed the atmosphere of Qonqrete (qbj_strideh), which mostly takes place in a housing complex under bright skies. Plenty of different routes to take in part 1, then a quite separate arena battle for part 2 — which I found disappointingly easy by means of a rather obvious strategy. I was disappointed when it ended, which I guess is a good thing. Nice use of the brutalist theme.

soul-art inc. (qbj_bonn) is a concrete base without too many surprises, but where I found the difficulty perfectly balanced — by accident. Somehow I missed the lightning gun right at the start, so I was running very very low on ammo — down to four shells when I reached the silver-key door. Happily, I was also down to a single health-point, so I backtracked to the start in search of health, and stumbled on the missing gun. From there on, it was easy. Not bad, but nothing special to my eyes. I'm not sure it gains anything from the concrete textures.

Entombed in Concrete (qbj_stickflip) is a great exercise in nostalgia. It took a moment to realise I was revisiting The Tomb of Terror (e3m3), and then I really enjoyed the sense that I was seeing it after a century of decay. I almost wish that the new map had followed the old one a little more strictly. (It's a similar feeling to the early parts of Portal 2, where you revisit some of the locations from Portal after a decades of plant growth has wrecked them.)

I'd love to see more classic maps redone in "100 years later" style.

Weighted Authority (qbj_chrisholden) and the same mapper's Aerowalk Rebound (qbj_chrisholden2) make a nice, complementary pair: while the former is thoughtful, and rewards careful exploration, the latter is essentially a deathmatch area populated with (mostly high-level) monsters. I don't usually like the second kind of map much, being by nature a slow, methodical player. But on this occasion, the map felt great, perhaps because it was so generously provisioned with powerful weapons, ammo and health that sheer momentum kept me going.

Both maps are excellent achievements: Weighted Authority could perhaps have done with a bit more combat to fill all that wide-open space, but Aerowalk Rebound was about as much fun as a map of that kind can be.

Set in Stone (qbj_wiedo) is fascinatingly unique, offering many difficult sequences that can only really be completed successfully after multiple failed attempts. At times I found it frustrating, but in the end it was deeply satisfying to have completed it. The shambler puzzle really is like nothing else I've ever played in Quake. Very memorable.

Pharmakon (qbj_naitelveni) is a strange level with some very sudden changes of pace. It starts out as careful exploration of a concrete base with wide open spaces and passages, shifts gear with a challenge whether you have shotgun a roomful of zombies before your quad runs out, reverts to slow exploration, then throws you into a grinder where you're supplied two quads and two pents to get through a crazy onslaught of enforcers, shamblers, fiends vores and knights. Then the final stretch is once more relatively sedate, with nothing more challenging than enforcers to deal with after the slaughter-room is cleared. All in all, I'm not sure what to make of it all. It's certainly competently put together, and each stage is enjoyable, but somehow it all feels like less than the sum of its parts.

There's a Certain Slant of Light (qbj_radiatoryang) is another of those maps where I really don't quite know what I think of it. Architecturally, it's a hopeless higgledy-piggledy mess of random halls, walkways, doors, pools and pillars — none of it making much sense, and with different bits connecting up in ways that seem to have no underlying pattern. And yet there is no denying that it keeps throwing fun challenges at you, requiring both careful tactical combat and some jump-in-get-your-hands-dirty horde set-pieces. I guess in the end I can't much admire this map, but I sure as heck do like it!

I liked the first three of the four towers that make up Fourth Vertex of Trapezoid (qbj_bmfbr), but was less enamoured of the bunfight that makes up the entirety of the fourth and last. There's a nice desolate atmosphere to the whole thing, with the bases of the towers disappearing into fog far below, lending a real gut-level sense of vertigo. I like that kind of emotionally resonant mapping. But the sudden shift from exploration model to horde-in-a-constricted-area model meant I didn't leave the level as happily as I had spent most of it.

Cured Core (qbj_rabbit7250) is just an astonishing debut map. It offers 253 kills (I got 244) across three quite distinct areas, and offers a quite unnecessary apology for the absence of a fourth. All the areas are hanging in the sky, to good atmospheric effect.

The first section is a wide open indoor area with a moving platform, much of which has to be negotiated with no ranged weapon: in fact, obtaining the shotgun is the goal of this subquest, because only once it's been found is it possible to shoot the distant button the opens the way to the second section. More than any other map I can think of, this one makes the acquisition of weapons into a real event, and while I wouldn't want every map to be this way it works really well as an occasional variation.

The second section takes place in and around a brutalist housing estate, with plenty of careful tactical combat — much of it having to be achieved with only the single shotgun. The grenade launcher is found here, and the nail gun can also be found: my only real criticism of the map is that I missed it through no fault of my own: it's in a small area behind a silver-key door, but because I had both keys I randomly chose to take the gold-key door first, and I soon found that I had taken a one-way trip that cut off access to the silver-key door. So I ended up doing a lot of the map without nails, unnecessarily. But I can't criticize this too harshly, as the SSG-only gameplay was an enjoyable challenge in its own right.

This takes us to the third section — a single wide open-air arena with six subquests required to lower six pillars enough that the player can climb to the exit. These subquests take place around the edges of the area, and offer plenty of variety. When I completed the one that finally got me the nail gun it was a truly joyous moment. The last subquest that I took on (the one where you drop into a pit) was properly hard, and left me with 9 health.

Any one of these sections would have made a good map. The three of them together, especially given the pleasantly organic transitions, make it an instant classic. What a debut!

More, please, rabbit7250!

By contrast, Tei's untitled map (qbj_tei) is a very rare example of a map so incomplete that it should not have been released at all. A juxtaposition of clumsy set pieces with ugly building and arbitrary play, it has opportunities to get stuck at the bottom of an inescapable pit right at the start, and really feels more like someone's experiments while learning an editor than it does like an actual playable map.

Also: name your maps, people.

Concrete Citadel (qbj_unijorse) also feels unfinished, though thankfully not in a hostile way. It's clumsy but competent, and passes the time enjoyably enough. Unfortunately, it has to be marked down for the fatal flaw that the exit is inaccessible. Like Vasya shkolnik, I killed everything, but still got "kill the bastards first" when trying to go through the last door. Bearing in mind Unijorse's warning above, "I think there may have been an issue with the targetnames on difficulties other than normal on Concrete Citadel", played on Normal difficulty rather than my usual Hard, but still had to noclip to complete the map.

The unimaginatively named qbj_Mr.M (qbj_mr_m) is extremely rough and ready, but enjoyable for all that. Facing mostly base monsters, ogres and scrags, we fight out way through a subterranean base into an open area where we need to take a roundabout route to lower the bridge leading to the exit area. Nothing especially new or exciting, but fun.

More good stuff in Greyscale Downflow (qbj_pinchy), a map of several distinct areas with similarly variable combat types, all adding up to feeling of adventure. It's set within some kind of water-processing plant, and my only real quibble is that I found it hard to know what to do next on a few occasions — not least, where to go after pressing the button behind the gold-key gate. (But it's a good thing I didn't find that straight away, or I would have missed out on the quad-fuelled killfest that got me to 100% kills). Nice.

I like the unique atmosphere of Cantilever (qbj_porglezomp), which takes place in and around a crumbling and half-ruined concrete arena. The map is quite short and really much too easy, but nevertheless satisfying to complete because of the sense of place. So far as I can see, this is Porglezomp's debut, and it's a very promising one.

V.A.B. (qbj_zbidou72) is a fantastic contribution to this pack: a base built around a huge rocket, in which you ascend to some very high heights and fight a lot of monsters. The escalating difficulty is well judged, and my only real regret is that I never found a rocket launcher or a lightning gun — both of them undoubtedly in secrets. (I found five of the eight, and got all 195 kills.) Scores highly in every area, and definitely among my top two or three maps in this pack.

I was enjoying Anger Wrought (qbj_greenwood) right till the end. Now, having killed everything and pressed the buttons through the gold and silver doors, I can't find the exit. I thought it would be the "No easy way in" door, but that is still locked. Help?

OK, I finally found the Anger Wrought exit. It's up on a catwalk, between the two areas that you access with the gold and silver keys.

Good map, apart from that frustration at the end. I enjoyed the of battling progressively through a real space, finding ways to cope early on when I had only the SSG and some difficult combats, and it was satisfying to get each new weapon.

The Cthon Building (qbj_eduardo) is pretty poor, to be honest: a blandly overlit and disconnected sequence of combats that doesn't make much sense and tries to make up for that with ludicrous over-powering of both player and enemies. Not actively unpleasant to play, but quite devoid of craftsmanship.

Having just played through, and loved Fallout: New Vegas (yes, I am ten years behind the curve) I was delighted to discover that this jam included Hoover Dam (qbj_annihilator), a very different rendition of the same real-life setting. This was mostly enjoyable, with several big-room combats that required a bit of thought to do well. But it suffers from the problem that until you emerge up onto the top of the dam at the end, you could be anywhere — and that the part of the game that takes place on the dam is the least satisfactory sequence, allowing you to skip most of the combat and just run into the exit teleport. So there's lots to like here, but it's all a bit anticlimactic just when it needs to up its game.

I enjoyed The Foundations of Cruelty (qbj_ekhudson) well enough, but found it unnecessarily disjointed. The garden section was a highlight, and the unpopulated but beautiful sculpture gallery another, but the undistinguished grey corridors that connect many of the sections really add little. I feel like this map could be a star or two better by some judicious cutting and compression.

Concrete Addiction - by Grash for 2022 Quake Brutalism Jam (qbj_grash) seems to be Grash's first map, and it's an interestingly mixed bag. the positives include some very nice small-scale architecture yielding a sense of a distinctive place. The negatives include shortness, arbitrariness, and the absolute dependency on finding the single secret (which to be fair is very easy) in order to finish the map. Also, some of the decorative blocks look confusingly like they could be buttons, which I think is a misjudgement. But although I've made more bad than good to say about this particular map, I think Grash looks really promising and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next.

I now come to an unnamed map by Chocohearts (qbj_chocohearts). Every time I come across a map that the author has not take ten seconds to name, I feel a flash of irritation. Poor Chocohearts is the author who has broken this camel's back. My new policy (starting now) is No reviews for unnamed maps.

Tower Theta (qbj_fifthskip) starts out normally enough, with a small arena battle, then two side-quests to get the silver and gold keys. But after that it gets weird. An elevator takes us high to the outside of a tower that, when we look down, is not attached to anything. The only way to progress is to jump down onto what looks for all the world like a rendering bug, and through a void in the sky to the area where the final combat takes place. I can't decide if I like the audacity of it or dislike its clumsiness. Anyway: fun.

After a brief indoor opening 50 Shades Of Grey (qbj_iyago) progresses to a Coagula-style outdoor arena with plenty of scope for long-range sniping, where the goal is to obtain the silver key. Behind the silver-key door is a completely separate Coagular-style area, geometrically arranged, in which enforcers and death-knights, plus the occasional scrag and vore, try to prevent you from opening the exist by touching two pillars. Each section is fine, but the map suffers a little from a lack of integration between them.

I had a really tough time with Voidcorp xpm lab 0016 (qbj_sewerh), but in a good way. I was often very low on ammo, several times very low on health, but almost always the difficulty felt fair. So in the end, it was deeply satisfying to complete the map, really feeling I'd achieved something. Yes, it's disjointed, relying much too heavily on teleporters to get the player to the next bit, and that's disappointing in part because most of them are quite unnecessary. But in the end what I will remember is the sense of being alone in a hostile base, and making it through against the odds.

I found Organ Foundry (qbj_riktoi) not just ludicrous but a depressing grind. Once you've made your way through an initial brief section of maybe 15 or so monsters, you fall into an area where six hundred (not a typo) dogs all attack you at once, and you try to use respawning nails, cells and quads to kill them. I made a couple of legitimate attempts before giving up and going to god mode. But even then the process of quad-nailing 600 dogs was tedious and joyless, and I felt nothing but relief when it was all over. And it was all over: after that, there is nothing more to the map.

It's weird. I've really liked some of riktoi's earlier maps. I guess this one is just not addressed to my condition.

Pratique Concrete (qbj_magnetbox) makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but is still a lot of fun. Arbitrary progression, unmotivated monster spawning, ugly textures, nonsensical elevators — I don't care, it was an enjoyable challenge.

I gave Liminality (qbj_newhouse) a fair go — several of them in fact — but by the time I reached seven kills, I had already been teleport-ambushed by a bunch of fields and a load of enforcers, then portal-ambushed by a shambler, then out-of-the-dark ambushed by a group of death-knights, then again by another group. Then I pressed a button and another shambler teleported into the nearly-dark cramped area and ... Well, I just realised I wasn't having any fun, and I don't have anything to prove to anyone. Hard pass.

In HCM's map, what "heavy explosives" are needed? I assumed it referred to rockets, but they don't have any effect.

Well, I found the backpack containing "heavy explosives" but I have no idea how to deploy them. This isn't an upgrade to my RL, and it doesn't seem to be a new weapon (as stepping through with the next-weapon key takes me straight from the LG to the axe). So how do I use these explosives?

(There is much to love about this map, but I really really wish Mazu had documented this stuff in the accompanying text file.)

Just re-upping this question ----^

Can anyone help me understand how to deploy "heavy explosives" in Mazu's (HCM) map?

Humiliatingly, I now realise that the answer is:

Just walk up to the site where the explosives are needed.

What. What a dummy I am.

Well, I finally made it to the end of Forbidden Brutal Religion (qbj_hcm), with 1162 of the frankly absurd 1193 kills. In fact, "frankly absurd" is the best overall description of this map. It's a work of genius, no doubt, yet also ... huh, what can I say?

The sheer mindbending scale of it all it great, but the extreme difficulty of certain sections spoils it from being in the very top rank for me. Twice I had to cheat in order to progress: at the very beginning, where the joint effects of the poison, the numerous enemies and the sparse ammo made it impossible for me to get started; and in the part where you drop into a pit and get assaulted from all sides.

Part of me wants to go back and try those parts again, see if I can achieve a totally legit playthrough. But at the time, I just didn't enjoy those parts.

The map also suffers from a lack of signposting regarding "heavy explosives". It should be made explicit that this doesn't mean grenades or rockets, but something else. And it should have been made clear that you use these explosives by walking up to one of a small number of pre-designated explosion points.

But I don't want to just quibble about what wasn't perfect, because the whole thing was just so satisfying. Whatever else Forbidden Brutal Religion is, it's astonishing.

I made it through the extreme horde-combat map Rampage (qbj_colossus) with an infuriating 780 or 781 kills. Except that I've not been able to exit: I'm told that the train is now active and I can hop on board, but I can't see where to go to make that happen.

But never mind. This is a map that is exactly what it intends to be and does exactly what it sets out to do. It consists of four quite separate areas: 1, the big outdoor space with the multi-storey car park; 2, the indoor hall with access to the elevator; 3, the gigantic Shub fight on top of the tallest building; and 4, the relatively sedate coda down in the subway station. Each of the first three can only be won by constantly moving, using infighting to thin the vast crowds, and finding tricks to stay alive. Very satisfying, although since the first stage is the most interesting, the map is maybe a little anticlimactic.

--

I made one more attempt to get on the train, and found that walking back and forth over the lava-coloured EXIT sign and ground level eventually triggers the closing animation.

After two highly extreme maps, it was quite a relief to get to Flatzone Maximus (qbj_stixc), short and relatively underpopulated map that I was able to cruise through with minimal difficulty, only once losing any health at all. It's not a masterpiece, but it's competently constructed and constitutes a promising debut. More, please.

The edge of the empire (qbj_mrtaufner) is an oddity, a map of several quite distinct sections. First comes a courtyard with two side-quests which must both be completed (in either order) to open the door to the next main area. That leads to symmetrical area that both arrive at the same multi-level final area, where several waves of combat meet you. None of it feels unfair — if anything, it may be a bit too easy — and it was a pleasant way to pass half an hour.

The Pits of Insanity (qbj_grue) is a really strange one to end on (if indeed this is the end: I will hunt once more through the start map, in case I missed any). At first I thought it was awful: bland, repetitive, empty. But as I persisted with it, I got more and more drawn into the twisted vision that lies behind it all, so that when I finally finished the (not very difficult) Static Demon section at the end, I was left with a sense of a unique experience. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le Quake.

I verified that I have played all 35 maps — almost all to completion, though a couple of them defeated me for various reasons. Of course I am awarding five stars: it would be ludicrous to do anything else. But at the same time I admit that it's with some sense of relief that I come to the end of this epic journey, and I can move on to playing some standalone maps!

Mike, thanks a lot for this useful review of Colossus' map (especially the last bit concerning the exit sign). It does indeed put the "brutal" in "brutalist", and made me go back to a map pack I had little desire to play -- this simply isn't my kind of texture or environment. The Quck influence is tangible, although this map, while undoubtedly hard, is a more reasonable effort.

I was eager to play Mazu's map, but also gave up on it after a few tries while playing the initial segment. Frustration from the get-to reminds me of Arcanum's first map, where you must defend yourself against a horde of zombies with a mere axe. Although I usually refrain from doing so, I might also cheat my way through this bit. Better than missing out on a probably great map.

Anyone able to beat Organ Foundry on Nightmare. The other difficulties are easy due to the respawning pentagrams, but Nightmare difficulty has no pentagram. :\ Anyone have tips or tricks for the rottweiler horde at the end?

Looks as if there are at least two maps which get you stuck if played on Easy (skill 0):

1) Cured Core: In the final area, the switch which requires you to beat several enemy waves in a pit gets stuck after the third wave or so.

2) Edge of the Empire: Penthouse door won't unlock after killing all enemies in the room.

Besides those two showstoppers, it's an excellent map pack with a lot of really good entries.

Amazing works of art. Rich, complex & very atmospheric level designs on display here. Some of the maps I wasn't crazy about. But most of them were a joy to experience. Overall, this pack delivers in spades. Highly recommended.