I’ve gotten back to Dawn of the Machine after getting stuck, and then deciding to play through every other official Quake 1 level set. This one was released recently by MachineGames for the 30th anniversary of the original game, and it’s very hard. You start the game with a reduced maximum health and ammunition for each of the weapons. There are pickups throughout the levels that will bump these up a little bit. Several of them are well hidden, I doubt I got half of them to be honest. Several of the levels took me around half an hour to beat, and had over 200 enemies in them. They will regularly spawn the hardest enemies in the game one after the other, often in places where it is extremely hard to dodge their attacks.
The game has an interesting structure. Several of the levels have doors that are locked with runes that you cannot open on the first pass through. Once you have beaten the majority of the levels, you collect a rune of sacrifice and end up in a hub level. This hub has slipgates that send you back to levels which you have already completed, but now you can go through those doors. Behind these doors is a secret exit which then takes you to a new level which has another one of the runes. Once you have all of the runes you can then pass through a final door in the hub level which gives you access to the final section.
Throughout the game are angel statues, various tomes with cryptic messages, and some stained glass windows of what looks like a female knight. Several of the messages talk about a Queen that rules the domain that the levels are set in. There is just enough story leaking through the levels to make everything feel like a cohesive whole, but it absolutely never gets in the way.
In one level, Veil of the Old Ones, you begin in a futuristic sci-fi base. There are signs all over of something going very wrong, there are doors smashed open and corpses everywhere. As you progress through the level there are enforcers which turn into fiends when you kill them. Later on, you find a basement with what looks like a dig site. Around it are damaged stone walls and pillars, and a path further down. Right at the bottom is an odd floating structure. The whole level feels like it’s telling a story with everything at its disposal, without ever explicitly saying it out loud. It’s wonderfully atmospheric.
In the level where you collect the rune of madness I ended up picking it up and charging my way through the rest of the level. There were just too many extremely powerful enemies for me to be able to fight. I never found myself doing that in any of the other levels I’ve played while going through all of Quake. It was a particularly exciting section.
The final boss is once again Chthon, from both the first episode of Quake and the end of Dimension of the Machine. It’s a little disappointing to be fighting it for the third time, but this time you’re right there with it in the lava wearing a protective suit. At a couple of points in the fight doors open on either side of the room and loads of knights run in attacking you. It was a tricky fight, there is a lot going on, and you have to keep refreshing your protective suit.
Now that I built my skills up enough by playing all of the other Quake levels I think these are my favourite ones. It feels much more like a sequel to that game than anything else that has been released in the 30 years since the original. It hits the weirdness and the atmosphere of that game perfectly while also building on the mechanics in several interesting ways.
