Map Review: Evocation Prelude

The Review

Played this map solo. Here's my thoughts.

The Good:

Puzzles and secrets are everywhere in this map. It's almost metroidvania-ish with areas looping back to each other and shortcuts opening. If you like exploring and looking for hidden stuff, this map is one of the best for it that I've seen. The way things are hidden is varied as well - some are just hidden out of sight until you poke around, while others are puzzles involving the environment around you. Not all of it is intuitive, but it was fun figuring out how to do various things throughout the map. Probably better with at least a couple other players along to expedite the "what am I supposed to do here" process.

Weapons are decently generous as long as you perform the aforementioned puzzles. You'll still want to lean on melee at first and keep one handy at all times, but if you're willing to look around and solve some puzzles you should find a lot of ammo to use. (Hint: There's a box in the spawn area with some melee, health, and ammo in it. Might be hard to find because of how frickin' dark it is, though.)

The environment has a lot of great things to look at. Weather effects, moving parts, room design... you get to go sightseeing. I can only imagine how much time was put into just this, and it makes the map more fun to explore.

The Neutral:

Three endings. One's the normal ending. One is if you find the secret pieces but don't find the keycode. And one is if you find both the pieces and the keycode. Frankly, they're all pretty unremarkable or just unpleasant due to runners.

A boss enemy. It's a decent design for an encounter, but at the same time, it's just a runner with a ton of HP. As such, it's not fun to fight, and if you're not good at kiting a runner, you're probably gonna die. If you're not playing solo, it's probably best for whoever is being chased to just run in circles while the others open fire or swing with melee (just be ready for him to change targets).

The Bad:

The lighting is easily the worst part of the map by a metric ton. You can tell just by looking at the screenshots, and ingame it's not much better. NMRIH does have dark areas as part of its design and often requires flashlights for those areas (example, the sewers in nmo_zephyr). But the majority of the map should, in my humble opinion, not require a flashlight to traverse. And in this map, you NEED a flashlight in almost every single room of the map. Meaning the use of any two-handed weapon is incredibly dangerous, as you won't be able to see where to aim and where to maneauver for dodging zombies. I ended up getting so frustrated by this that I simply turned on mat_fullbright to play the map. I'm no lighting expert myself, and I'm aware getting good lighting in Hammer is harder than you'd think. But this map really, really needs more light. If some areas require flashlights then fine, but it shouldn't be the vast majority of the map. You shouldn't be looking at lanterns/light bulbs/fire all over the place that don't illuminate more than three inches away from themselves. It makes no sense. (My honest and earnest advice to the mapmaker - open any other map VMF for this game you can get, even if you have to decompile official maps, and look to their light entities for examples. I've learned a ton on how to place and configure entities like lights by studying how other mappers do it.)

Runner spam. To be fair, it's not that often, and the map does telegraph some of its runner traps with obvious trap walls and not-so-subtle placement of hammer/boards to imply you might want to use them before grabbing an objective item. But there simply are too many runners in some places. Especially near the end (big shock) where you have to hold out against a ton of runners for two minutes waiting for an elevator.

The super-secret ending isn't worth it. Finding the code to access it is not for a special end, it's for an extra hard extract. Extra hard because you're just running in a spiral while being attacked by endless runners that are ghost-effected and only visible when they move close enough to you. Hard-to-see runner zombies in a map that's incredibly dark? Yeah, I'm not a fan.

The Verdict:

As a map of exploration and puzzle solving, it's top notch. I'd never heard of this map before today, and I have to assume it's because of its lighting. It's just too dark to see, and the screenshots do not make me want to play it. Nor do the runner traps that kill me in seconds when I'm 30+ minutes into the map. But it does a lot of interesting things in its layout and puzzles that impressed me deeply.

I do have some tips for playing it (and maps similar to it, problems-wise) for those hosting it locally and have the ability to turn on cheats. This is primarily for those who are playing it alone. (You can still try it if you're hosting locally and having a friend or two join.)

For the light, walk up to any wall in the spawn room, where your face is right up against it (or a small step back or two, feel free to experiment) and input this into your console:

ent_create light_dynamic targetname icantsee _cone 0 _inner_cone 0 _light "255 168 0 0" distance 700 spotlight_radius 10 brightness 1

Next, aim down at your feet, and input this into the console:

ent_fire icantsee setparent !player

This will cause the light to attach to you and move with your head movements. Think of it like attaching a lantern to your hip. The lighting won't be perfect as props will kind of "pop in and out" based on your distance to them, but at least you'll be able to see the vicinity around you while being able to two-hand weapons and carry physics props. Feel free to play with the numbers a bit too if you don't like the brightness - I recommend changing the "distance 700" part to be bigger or smaller depending on how powerful you feel the light is.

And if you don't like runners, try this out:

ent_create logic_timer refiretime 0.3 startdisabled 0 ontimer"npc_nmrih_runnerzombie*,BecomeShambler"

This will create a timer that refires several times a second, turning any runner into a shambler. (This won't affect kids, but there's not many on this map so I feel it's fine.)