Awesome map!
Comfy size but puzzling to progress through, innovative & challenging combat without being excessive or cruel, full of lovely detail. Minimalist in the proper sense, it achieves a richer experience without resort to quantity. Be warned that it is here and there a head-scratcher & Fireplace isn’t as hyper-formalised in progression mechanism conventions as id1 / AD, despite otherwise aping the style.
The brushwork is a bit clunky — especially on the ramparts where there’s a lot of edges to miss / fall off / get stuck in. But it’s never a blocker, and aesthetically it’s a very pleasing style — lots of delightfully executed detail & story-telling that fits with the general chunky detail of the environments; but also chunky enough not to make you miss the wood for the trees: a great environment to keep searching through in loops. In the vein of playfully rough edges, I loved the verve of this being an unapolagetic fall-off-the-world map: it doesn’t fully enclose, it doesn’t emulate the trappings of the ‘floating in the void’ style, or use other narrative brushwork to explain how or where this place is, but the brushwork on the edges is all organic. Missing a jump and gibbing on contact with the edge is a lol not a bug.
And the loops are great! It took me ages to randomly try what was needed to do to ‘find another way’, but it was a great environment to have that head-scratcher in. The whole thing is so neat and tight and delightful in the way the level opens up iteratively while going through the same areas trying to figure out what to do next, and in what is overall such a beautifully small map — that’s really ingenious, a superlative example of quality over quantity.
The firefight in the main outdoor area was fantastic. Really judicious enemy combination & placements and very fresh bullet-hell type challenge from the ballistics: that part especially cool because even while as mods have given us z-aware ogres for some time, they’re usually big easy targets; pulling off the siege of the castles first-line defences despite my wounds was a really satisfying victory, and riding off that high while puzzling over the intriguing but reserved brushwork of the outdoors made puzzling over what to do next much less frustrating than it would otherwise have been.
For players struggling to get all secrets, there is a somewhat obviously present area I knew was there from my first playthrough but couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to access; it uses the same access mechanism as that first puzzler of getting inside the castle proper; I repeatedly thought & tried applying that logic unsuccesfully then dismissed that option. It turns out the trigger area is absurdly specific, oddly positioned & completely visually indistinguishable: I had to use noclip to identify it. And that whole secret feels either bugged designed to some unfathomable abstraction I don’t get, because it is by far the most delightful and detailed, but also… What’s with the bookcase?! It almost feels like Cthulhu couldn’t decide which of two access mechanisms they wanted and chucked both in broken forms: One with a clear visual narrative but no operating function, the other with operating function but zero visibility. But again, even this odd frustration seems somehow artful.
Even in all its flaws, Fireplace is beautiful!
Extra credit for the kitchens homely details, what’s hanging in the store-room is so cool. And the barrel taps yielding wine was such a cute and finnicky but incidental detail, I love it.
