Sweet! I particularly like the cyclopean scale of hcm's entry. ... though I don't see that name in the credits above. Strange.

They are actually listed in the credits, for hcm is HardcoreMazu, or Mazu for short.

A couple of these don't seem like Honey to me at all; however, in general, this is a really nice pack! Fairweather's map, The Occult Honeypot; Hardcore_Mazu's map, The Gate of Long Forgotten Heresy; and Danzadan's map, Honeyjuice, are, in my opinion, the standouts. Yoder's map is beautifully constructed, but (spoiler alert) it's a Base sewer map, so it's a real stretch on the theme (it's got amber fog though!). Yoder sure loves his sewers :)

Considering the maps were done over a weekend, this pack is actually quite impressive!

Danz's map crashes when I try to quicksave:

Quicksaving... Saving game to /home/someone/.quakespasm/sm196_pack/quick.sav... *** buffer overflow detected ***: /usr/lib/quake/quake-engine terminated

(QuakeSpasm 0.93.1, Debian 10.6)

Honey Ice (sm196_artistical) is obviously unfinished: the kill-count of 3, the silver-key pool that's impossible to get out of, the room under the chandelier thing that's impossible to drop into, the absence of even the three monsters that should be there. I will pass mutely over this, and go on to the next map.

Honeyjuice (sm196_danz) is much better, being a complete and finished map, albeit a small one. (Well, it's a speed-map, I don't hold smallness against it!) Really nice atmosphere, though it reminds me much more of the Honey jam-pack than of Honey itself, being nicely lit and splendid rather then gloomy. Nice progression of gameplay, and I was disappointed to find I'd reached the end. (No idea how to get the quad up on the high ledge in the final battle room, though.)

The Occult Honeypot (sm196_fairweather) raises the bar further, with a nice two-way choice at the start — which of two silver-key doors to open — and a sequence of carefully constructed combats along the way. Really nice.

The gate of long forgotten heresy (sm196_hcm) is outstanding, though I don't really understand what the title means: there is no obvious gate at the heart of the map. Instead, there is a vast open space with balconies around it, and battles along the way with a nice blend of different enemies. Strong on atmosphere, good on gameplay — let down a little, perhaps, only by a rather anticlimactic ending.

Lost pool (sm196_ing) is a really interesting experience. Usually I most enjoy maps that are laid out like real places, with a sense of exploration and discovery. But sometimes you can get a really good result by skewing hard in the opposite direction, and that's what Lost pool does. It's essentially a series of puzzles: not of the button-pushing and secret-finding variety, but in figuring out the best way to approach the various combats. Very enjoyable, even though it's ugly.

Muks infuriatingly untitled map (sm196_muk) is a really nice slice of Honey-ness, with a good approximation to the vast abandoned ruin aesthetic of the original, but it is let down by three things (four if you count the lack of a title): it's underpopulated, and could easilt support twice as many monsters; progression a bit simplistic and predictable; and the ending is highly anticlimactic. But that sounds like a catalogue of complaints, which is not really fair. I enjoyed this.

Dankspire (sm196_pinchy) is another map that reads like a series of combat puzzles rather than a real space to explore — for almost every monster, if you stopped to think about it, you'd ask "How did he get up there?!". But as with Muk's map, that's not actually a problem, and I enjoyed the unique challenge presented by the verticality and the sheer geometry of it all. My only real complaint I that six of the monsters eluded me, despite my having found all three secrets and killed everything I saw.

Finally, Metal Sewer (sm196_yoder) starts out really nicely, with a relatively open sewer and a blend of close-up and distant combats. The visuals are good, the layout is interesting. The only problem is that once you get through the silver-key door, things wind up pretty quickly, and there is only the most peremptory of challenges behind the the gold-key door. To me, this feels like the opening of a bigger map — one that I hope Yoder will go on to complete. I guess when the worst criticism you have of a map is that you want more of it, it's doing OK!

This is an extremely solid pack, containing maps that far transcend what we used to think of as speedmaps. Not so very long ago, it would have been worth five stars. But so much has happened in the last decade (Rubicon Rumble Pack, Arcane Dimensions, Alkaline) that the bar has definitely raised, and I reluctantly have to give this only four stars — rounded down from 4.49!