Really beautiful for a map made in such a short space of time. As with the initial version, I like the use of traps and the abundant and easy yet gratifying secrets, and in theory I like the crate-hopping section (though in practice it just meant that lost a lot of precious health from slipping into the slime).

Whereas the first version had me madly dashing towards the exit with no ammo and very little health left, avoiding the remaining monsters, here I was able to complete the map more gracefully -- but it took me quite a few attempts and several saves and reloads to get that far. It remains a fairly brutal experience, mostly because it repeatedly forces you to fight tough monsters in close quarters.

In short, lovely to look at and theoretically very neat, but for my taste a little too unforgiving in practice.

As an aside, I loaded this in id1 just out of curiosity, to see if it would work. That has the map default to the scrolling Quake sky instead of the skybox (for which you need to play the map in retrojam1) -- and in my opinion it actually looks a lot more atmospheric:

"Arlyeh"? Why spell it like that instead of the correct R'lyeh?

I admire this map a lot, but don't particularly enjoy it. I think the problem is that too many of the ambushes happen in areas where you can't really find the space to deal with them well -- retreats are often cut off. I feel like it wouldn't take much to lift this to a five-star map, but somehow it's not quite happening for me.

Really cool map. Loved from start to the end. Layout & atmosphere are great. Don't know why mfx was hard on himself in readme - the map is absolutely cool. Maybe mobs are way too hardcore, too many of shamblers & vores, but it's walk in the park if you will be looking for secrets. 5 of 5