so i recently wrapped up scythe, the first of erik alm's highly influential megawads. it's perhaps not as fondly remembered as scythe 2. but i'm the sort of person that isn't going to play something called scythe 2 until scythe is completed. and overall i had a good time with it. somehow it lives up to its reputation to an even fuller degree than i expected - for better and worse.
first off, the levels at the start of the wad are incredibly short and easy. some of these levels might even be easier than e1m1 or entrance. i didn't spend more than 5 minutes on a level until map 15, and i probably could have done that in five minutes too if i hadn't insisted on finding the secret exits myself. most secrets feel pretty perfunctory - i found 46 of the 52 in the whole wad and tend to not look particularly hard for them. the very first secret just involves picking up a chainsaw in plain sight. the secret exit is also a little strange as there's a super shotgun just before it - the first one in the wad. i thought it might be for continuous players but there's a super shotgun right at the start of map31 anyway.
things really pick up in the second half of the wad. starting with map32 the frequency of close quarters intense firefights escalates substantially. map32 in particular feels like the sort of thing that would later have an influence on joshy's work (and he does list scythe as one of the inspirations for speed of doom). up through map25 however, the maps and the size of the encounters remains pretty small. then fear (map26) hits and has 666 monsters in it, and a surprisingly generous amount of health and ammo and even a few invicibilities. the next three maps are not as big but still pretty tough. terror is a spooky and resource-constrained map that takes a page out of monster condo's book. run from it requires exacting precision to get to the end in under thirty seconds; it's memorable but i really did not enjoy it at all. and hell on earth is an attempt to do a spicier version of downtown, which is not really something i would have thought anyone would want enough to make.
and then... and then there's fire and ice, the last map. this took probably at least hour and a half of real time, and probably more than a quarter of the time the whole wad took overall. it's only a slight increase in monster count over fear, but while fear hands out a bfg, tons of ammo, and big crowds of monsters, everything in fire and ice seems calculated to make eliminating the enemies as challenging as possible. there's little to no mindless circle strafing here. probably the toughest bit is a narrow ledge absolutely stuffed with mancubi and dotted with the occasional cyberdemon sentry. falling off means having to run all the way back to the start, which is mostly just annoying. then at the very end there's a tiny island with two cyberdemons, and stepping onto it causes the whole bridge to start flooding with revenants and archviles. those two cyberdemons at the end are no pushover either; i wound up taking the cowards route and using the plasma rifle from range, but it was probably possible to get in there with the BFG. really the only mercy the map offers is some conveniently placed monster-blocking linedefs that i feel latter mappers would learn how to avoid. but ultimately it's kind of insane to consider that this is in the same WAD as the first map which has a total of 19 monsters and nothing more threatening than an imp.
anyway, i'll probably get to scythe ii sooner rather than later, although my understanding is that it's quite a bit harder.