This is probably a bit wobbly of a response, but I hope it comes across clear enough! Thank you again for your great analysis of an old game.If I recall, Wolf3D editing is about as simple as filling in pixels in a super zoomed-in MSPaint picture with the pencil tool. This is a fantastic instance of it, I think! I find it rare a game manages to trip me up into feelings like that, but I love it when it happens. Is the way this has been presented to me true, that this door is unopenable? Can I trust the bare layout of this game? Or am I supposed to read between the lines, find a secret door? Or even, have to make up my own answer? Recently I've found that one of my favourite experiences in a game is that of confusion- not like 'where do I go now, arghh' annoyance but confusing in the same way a story with an unreliable narrator is. It sounds like such a large impact, to think it was -meant- to be unpassable, even though I doubt the designers would have intended players to think that! I'm kind of envious of your experience for that reason. That's something that would have been impossible for me to have happen when I played games as a kid, since I got into the (kind of boring) habit of looking up anything when I got stuck. That's amazing to me, in how it changes your perception of the game (or at least this one map). Something that really struck me in this article, and really prompted me to write a comment, was when you said you thought for years a door in this level was impossible to get through. Great write ups! I always played the game off as a less fun Doom, I'm glad to have been wrong about that. I just recently read through all your articles about notable levels in Wolfenstein. but hey, it's the last level before Hitler!! anything goes! placing the blue key in a devious location which potentially requires a great deal of back-tracking really has no precedent in this episode, let alone the previous ones. and on only one of those you actually need both keys to beat the level, and they're both very easy to find (floor four). only three other maps in the episode even use two keys at all! (three, four, and six). not a particularly fair thing to do, especially in a level requiring two keys. so if you managed to make it to this part of the floor before picking that up (which is entirely possible), you'll have to run ALL the way back and scour the entire level to find that key. and guess what? these two locked doors at then end (point 8) require the blue key, which you picked up in one of the arms of the swastika on the first part of the level. another rite of passage, another very game-like portal indeed. design-wise, and scope-wise it vastly overshadows everything else we've seen up to this point.Ī barrel maze!! you'll have to clear each row of barrels to get to the end of the room. it really carries the rest of the episode on its shoulders. Tom Hall's really used his imagination to create many moments where the player feels the rug has been pulled from under them, while still never not feeling like some kind of real environment which could have existed (something he neglects in a lot of other maps). it's the kind of map that makes a lot of promises to the player and delivers on all of them. and yet it's one of the closest things this game has to A Masterpiece (episode four map five is another contender). it has almost nothing to do, design-wise, with the rest of the maps in the episode, beyond a few bits of foreshadowing in the previous level, and that it uses the gray stone texture of the first five levels. i was terrified of it, yet it was also the primary reason i'd play through the episode in the first place. it was probably the reason i stayed obsessed with Wolfenstein in the first place. it was by far My Favorite Wolf3D Map for years and years.

This map has been a source of extreme obsession for me, particularly when i was younger.

Wolfenstein 3d maps