Doom Review: Jumpwad

Jumpwad by Grain of Salt & Ribbiks

This is something really special and different from my favourite mapping duo Grain of Salt & Ribbiks, who have previously had great success with the their annual Halloween mapsets Orange is True Love & Wormwood series. These previous mapsets acted as a showcase for some really fantastic boom & mbf mapping tricks like bouncy walls and instant kill floors and Jumpwad takes this to the next level, completely transforming doom into a puzzle platformer and implementing some insane tricks I never thought would be possible without an advanced scripting language/zdoom.

Jumpwad is a series of seven platforming maps. There are no monsters, no weapons, no risk of death and no HUD. Instead, the player has the ability to jump on a cooldown by pressing fire. The jump works by spawning an archvile explosion behind the player and it can be triggered in mid air to act as a sort of double jump. If you’ve played any of those jump maps in zandronum, you’ll be very much at home with the concept. The difference is that instead of racing to get the best time, you have to collect gems. A certain number of large gems are required to unlock the exit and are tracked internally by the game as kill%, and there are small gems tracked as item% for completionists that tend to be better hidden and gated behind harder jumps. There’s also a secret eternal flame hidden on every map which will be a massive pain to find and collect (especially on map07 if you attain an S rank - good luck with that, seriously).

There’s quite a nice difficulty curve and each map introduces a new platforming gimmick to contend with: ‘Inside Job’ introduces conveyor belts and ‘Unlimited Ice Cream Factory’ pushes their use even further and mixes things up with frictionless icey surfaces. ‘It’s Cold Up Here’ introduces these cool respawning explosive gems you can jump off in mid-air and ‘There’s Been a Murder’ introduces archviles & some static eye props that do the vile flame attack for some fancy jumps. ‘Bread and Bear’ is the crowning jewel of the set and has some of the most incredible boom/mbf tricks i’ve ever seen in a map: A sprawling adventure with projectiles that knock you around, a rank system that grades your performance at the end of the map and unlocks some bonus challenge paths, an incredibly complex secret combination puzzle and even a short hidden side quest.

The inevitable question people are probably going ask is how difficult this set of levels actually is. Ribbiks is known for making harder maps and his output post-sunlust has been increasingly esoteric. Platforming in doom is tricky given doomguy’s acceleration and lack of friction and is also usually associated with the new school of particularly challenging maps and slaughter stuff. I was expecting the worst but honestly, it’s perfectly manageable as long as you have an understanding of basic straferunning and a bit of patience. The hardest bit is learning how to come to a dead stop after making a long jump without sliding off the other edge of a platform.

Most map exits only require a handful of big gems to exit so the trickier areas can be bypassed a lot of the time. The maps get very open and non-linear so feel free to explore looking for alternative routes if really stumped. None of these big gems need any fancy SR50 jumps or other tricks, but some are still gated behind much harder jumps, so collecting 100% of them is a much greater challenge. There are a handful of optional nasty extended sequences with a lot of precise jumps on tiny platforms with a long walk to try again which made demo recording irritating - the circular climb to the final four big gems on It’s Cold up Here is evil - but with saves they’re not going to be so bad. Going the full completionist route for 100% small gems and the eternal flames does require SR50 jumps and knowledge of a few other tricks, so there’s a high skill ceiling for mastery and a lot of replayability there.

The maps look gorgeous, are thematically distinct and have the intricate dense layouts you’d expect from late era Ribbiks & GoS. They’re designed with software rendering tricks in mind, so try to keep that in mind and use an appropriate port like prboom+, eternity or dsdadoom or just make sure that gzdoom is set up properly in advance. If you don’t use software rendering then the screen will flash red whenever you jump, which is not going to be very fun. The music is great really contributes to a nice relaxing exploratory vibe. I can’t recommend this set highly enough, it’s the best doom project I’ve played all year. Figuring out the many secrets of Bread and Bear and going back to get an S rank and attempt a 100% run alone was fun enough to make this set an instant classic in my mind.

Definitely worth a go, please try it.