Quake Review: Twisted Christmas Jam 2022

With another Christmas comes another fabulous set of maps from the ever-productive Quake community. The level of quality was consistently high throughout and there was a lot of variety of mapping styles and concepts in this set. I played through these on evil difficulty (50hp cap, shadow axe out of the gate and faster projectile speed) so my individual comments on balance and stuff will reflect that:

• start - Cute and cosy! The trees looked fabulous and the texturing and fog does a good job of selling that deep wintry vibe. Fun hedge maze to get to evil. I did not experience the shambler in the window and surprise home invasion on stream but it certainly caught me by surprise on my second playthrough.

• tcj_bisquit - Nicely detailed fortress with some cool exterior areas filled with lava and dead trees. A lot of decent platforming based encounters throughout - nice flow throughout with some nice vertical bits like the gold key rafters with plenty of opportunities for aggression. The three by three moving box puzzle was fun but it desperately needed a respawning ammo box there. My first attempt I arrived with no nails and a very minimal amount of shotgun ammo which led to a soft-lock. Experimentation is necessary to figure out how the big platforms move in a situation where the player is not necessarily going to be flush with ammo.

  As for the eponymous gift hunt - it was pretty satisfying finding and destroying all the gifts. Some of them were out in the open and others better hidden behind walls. The actual reward for finding the gifts seemed somewhat lacking though - no extra resources to unwrap and as far as I can tell nothing was unlocked by finding the full set beyond the inherent satisfaction of 100% completion.

• tcj_greenwood - Greenwood immediately furnishes the player with a grenade launcher, SSG and lightning gun, which sets the expectation for some meaty combat. The first encounter does not disappoint with multiple waves of mid and high tiers monsters being released into a large flat room filled with pillars in a grid formation. These pillars make enemy pathfinding pretty chaotic and frustrate mindless circlestrafing. If the player wants more ammo, they need to push toward the boxes in the middle of the grid instead of hanging around the edges. The end result is simple yet very effective and a lot of fun.

  Rest of the map is an aggressive rush through arcane dimension’s extended base monster bestiary. Wide open layouts but scaled well and not too sparse as to be underpopulated. There’s a great secret quad that provides a lot of potential and a lot of verticality and sniper ledges that allow rocketeers, centurions and grenade fellas to provide constant pressure. Definitely one of Greenwoods better jam contributions, I’d strongly recommend it.

• tcj_hcm - Adored this one. Two potential paths at the start - one that leads to the jump boots or one that leads to the lava shield. The obvious choice to me was the jump boots for the incredible amount of utility in finding secrets and getting out of bad situations in combat so I did that.

  Constant pressure from sniper enemies and lots of vertical angles to consider all the time. The trap and resulting path back up on the way to the silver key is a masterpiece of bullying the player forward only to unleash an ever greater threat every set of the way. The two main arena fights were also a lot of fun with the grenade launcher in particular being a nice fight for space.

  Secrets are standard Mazu fare and rewarding to figure out. Some are very tricky to get to upon first discovery but finding the jump boots and opening shortcuts makes them accessible for more casual play, which is nice.

  The big weakness of the map for me was the somewhat underdeveloped gold key path and lack of options that the lava shield afforded in terms of secret hunting. The library maze isn’t bad, but it’s a lot flatter and simpler than the very interconnected and vertical silver key wing.

• tcj_idolon - A very cool first map from idolon. Build quality was generally really nice with a few areas that really stood out in my mind like the big platforming section over the lava with the fog and circular archways. I liked the two-tone colour scheme for the temple & spiral patterned doors. This is another map with an amazing soundtrack.

  Nice little fight setups with the waves of enemies in a couple of arenas but progression could be a tad confusing: I couldn’t figure out the two switches to make the walkway extend so I circle jumped the gap. I also got a bit turned around in the area after leaving the first temple area and couldn’t figure out where to go despite the attempt at using newly spawned-in enemies as breadcrumbs. Nothing that totally stumped me though, just a bit of friction. Looking forward to future releases!

• tcj_ish - Classic ish hot start with a vore providing pressure and ranger lacking any means to deal with them. Pick your poison and select a path to commit to and hope it proves the right tools to carve out a safe zone. This map is pretty dark and oppressive but it’s relatively easy to manage with cautious play after the initial push. Some puzzling platforming elements with the suspended switches, pushable crates and the timed powerup variant of the jump boots. I enjoyed using the blast belt to grenade jump up to a switch in one instance. Resources were rather tight, even after finding secrets.

  In general I’d say this was a a bit less savage than the standard ish map experience. Beyond the very start nothing was totally overwhelming and with cautious play a lot of the fights can easily be disarmed.

  My main criticism is that the ending funicular fight was a bit of a damp squib given the fact I had the quad available and jump boot powerups. Some half life style ambushes from the top as the lift descends would have added some extra spice to cap things off.

• tcj_iyago - Something a bit different from iYago - an almost entirely monster free map with a linear exploratory focus. Amusing meta narrative at the start with the transition from Halloween decorations to Christmas. Some cute mapping tricks to create strange dream-like architecture. A lot of the tricks reminded me of silent hill 4 and some of the sequences in episode 3 of Death Wish for blood.

  There were a few spots where I felt like I was trapped in the pitch dark without any indication of which direction to move to continue the map. At one point this was because I was half way down some sort of slope leading to the next area. These snags were minor but irritating enough to break the immersion somewhat and make me want to crank the gamma up. Still, great fun.

• tcj_magnetbox - Rough and ready architecture for this one - quite boxy and simple but the combat is plenty of fun throughout. I enjoyed the starting room and having the option of pressing all of the buttons to spawn in every wave of monsters at once - as a rule more chaos often leads to more fun. There were some pretty good ambushes and the quad trap was a fantastic bit of cruelty. The pumpkin or tree choice at the end was lost on me and I ended up achieving both endings. I feel that could have been fleshed out a bit or had a little centerprint message to help contextualise it. Oh and the chopped and screwed version of O Holy Night was cute.

• tcj_nickster - A really cute concept. The crashed space ship looked great and the mansion/party theming was very novel and well put together. Especially liked the little bits of destructible furniture littered around to get shredded by the intense shotgun crossfire. Soundtrack was a banger too, well done.

  Combat design was satisfying but a bit limited. The map relies on large hordes of arcane dimensions base enemy variants and the player has a widowmaker to carve through them. The issue - as with Nickster’s previous map Smells like Grandma’s - is that this tended to devolve into doorway camping as the enemies all slowly filtered through. On evil at least, playing aggressively was a death sentence in the main room as the rocketeers and extremely fast grenade spam. That said, it doesn’t really matter that much because there’s a visceral satisfaction in holding choke-points against such low health enemies and mulching them.

  Finally, the floyd end boss in the space ship with loads of health was really funny. I was starting to doubt they were even killable at the end. Rest in peace little fella.

• tcj_pinchy - Easily wins the award for most christmas-y map in the set. A great Pinchy layout - very open and naturalistic but stuffed with monsters to put the impetus on the player to push out and search for resources. Only using AD’s christmas monsters was a cute idea and worked well with this layout despite their obvious limitations thanks to all of the various angles and raised ledges they could ambush from. Pinchy did a great job of selling the santa’s workshop theme cleanly making this map look wintery. The northern lights in the skybox looked lovely, as did the fairy light and the little frozen lake area. Only complaint would be the awkward clipping on the trees and bushes while fighting sometimes.

• tcj_spoot - Really nice looking wizard textured architecture with that wintry twist of snowfall and little snowdrifts piled up against pillars. I was a big home alone fan growing up so the secrets in this map were a treat.

  Brisk pace, decent combat. Finding all of the candy canes was fun and the secret fight was a worthy reward for all that effort. Really it was just a lovely map to play, I don’t have any nitpicks at all.

• tcj_strideh - This map is absolutely gorgeous with the incredible curvy architecture, theming work and sigil motifs. Adored the unexpected change of locale to the void half way through the map too. The soundtrack is fantastic and appropriate, with the heartbeat the the start building after you rise from your coffin and get to work, but it seemed to be a little blown out volume wise with some clipping issues. I’m not sure if that’s an intentional bit of lo-fi production work but it was a bit distracting whenever combat had quietened down.

  Really good use of the ad progressive weapon pick-up system to allow for a branching path at the very start of the map but I think there was probably not quite enough nail ammo in the right hand path (chambers path?) to go there first comfortably. This is a great map layout to play extremely fast and aggressively.

  One big issue I ran into was the door-frames being narrow and a bit awkward to navigate smoothly. They also frustrate the big sword fella’s pathfinding far too easily making fighting them on the upper walkways easy to exploit. The chthon fight was incredibly difficult for me with evil’s faster leading projectiles and I have to admit at first I wasn’t a fan of getting hit for 50+ damage by the ball splash. It’s very, very dangerous to deal with the spawn-in threats and have to turn your back on the guy throwing projectiles that aren’t predictable. To get over that I went back and started practising on skill 10 with very fast projectiles and taught myself how to better manipulate chthon’s aim.

• tcj_sze - A really savage map on evil difficulty. The lost souls are masters of blocking jumps while platforming and generally getting in the way while fighting. I greatly enjoyed trying to utilise the boils for my own ends. The two big arena fights at the end of the map are incredibly harsh in terms of spatial management - the four vores and fiends are a lethally effective combo when playing aggressively and finding a way to lose the vore projectiles safely is challenging given the map layout with the ramps (as it should be!). Final fight is great fun but I couldn’t figure out the logic for spawning the quad. Playing around with it off stream I found that sometimes the quad would drop super early and force the remaining waves to spawn in on top of each other, telefragging the shamblers instantly which is a bit of an anticlimax.

I will echo everybody else’s comments here and say the freezing/melting mechanics were really nice and thematically appropriate. A great way to re-use spaces and make a very natural linear flow from start to finish. Just lovely, perhaps the best map of the set.¹