A mod for Doom II: Hell on Earth
Sunder is a well known Doom mapset featuring slaughter map style design. It was initially released in 2009 with plans to turn it into a full megawad.
Reviews View More
Not that hard, absolutely annihilated it on the IDDQD difficulty.
This review contains spoilers
(Spoilers for Doom Eternal and its DLCs, not in an indepth discussion of them but I guess I imply the shakeout of them. I don’t mention anything here that would qualify as spoilers for Sunder itself)
What a project. If whatever Bethesda was doing in the lore of Doom Eternal and The Ancient Gods is to be taken seriously, Sunder is a jaded boomer chiming in with a welcome "it's not that deep" and reasserting that doomguy is first and foremost, a guy. Obviously the Brutalism/Neo-Gothic aesthetic help counter the conceit that an individual could be of cosmic importance, but really the pedestrian aspect of doomguy is most plainly reinforced through the WAD's combat. Maps 1-14 reiterate that DOOM Is Hell, and so the room design is less neat arenas designed for efficient circlestrafing and instead asymmetric, incongruent hazardrooms designed to fuck over intruders, i.e. you. Map 5 is really egregious with the "hazard" part of that philosophy but in general completing a Sunder map requires erasing the mental map of DOOM’s geography hithertho, and instead engaging with the world laid out before us. It flies in the face of typical DOOM convention to have inescapable pits, instant-death platforming, and damaging floors on every would-be safe space, but it's in here all the same. Also noticeable that insane_gazebo doesn't even really employ crushers, DOOM's intended environmental hazard, for this to work—since you can’t even flip the environment on the demons, it’s only doomguy who struggles to move in this world.
Sunder transforms this combat philosophy into something profound in maps 15-19—the theme of environment-as-enemy continues in this set but we also find insane_gazebo using more targeted and choreographed encounters. Generally in slaughter-based mapsets, you’ll see encounters where around 100+ Hell Knights + Revenants drop in an open area with a BFG to clear them out; in this set however, you’ll find not only stereotypical slaughter encounters but also encounters in very tight rooms, with more frequent “problem enemies” such as Archvilles, Pain Elementals, or Cyberdemons joining in with typical Hell Knight + Revenant combo. You think this might be a return to combat that is more doomguy-centric, but nope, it's even more alienating. The reason being is that the key element of slaughter-maps, the BFG, is just straight up unavailable for most of the maps in this set until the very end. Thus, in an inversion of power, Cyberdemon infighting becomes the new BFG--the intended clears of some rooms in this stretch will have Cyberdemons picking up more kills than doomguy! what the fuck! I've never seen something like it outside of some self-designated challenge and puzzle maps. Sunder’s combat truly felt like something different when I realized that doomguy wasn’t the most dangerous person in the room.
The "doomguy ain't shit" narrative also bleeds over into the aesthetic in this set. Aesthetics which can only be described as Bronze Age Temple Architecture combined with surreal Futurism combined with the Neo-Gothicism of the early levels. And a Beehive motif? IDK what fukken architecture movements I should pull on to sell the point here, I dropped the Annotated Mona Lisa 50 pages in, the levels are genuinely imposing and uniquely beautiful is what I’m saying here. Anyone who has loaded map 15 and stepped out the first room can tell you how immediately insignificant they feel. This invocation of things grander than doomguy is also in this set's 'lore' so to speak--unlike Sunlust's reference to religious ritual and violent machinery, Sunder's evocations are all to mythology, from both Sunder's world and our world. "Archives of the Technomancer", "Whispers of the Gnarled King" and the openly blunt "Babylon's Chimera" are all titles which summon historical specters across the maps, hinting at a chronology of how we ended up here at this time fighting these demons, a chronology that doomguy has nothing to do with.
It is with that realization is where I felt that Sunder as a whole became profound to me. Sure we are nominally the protagonist in these maps, the one who sets everything in motion and clears out the enemies, but it’s hard to look at the encounters, the buildings, the titles, and the grand scale of these maps and surmise that they are still about doomguy. The only thing that can be fairly surmised is that the locations here, their vastness in history and architecture, were the life-projects of somebody else. The thought that broke their sleep schedule, the idea they couldn't stop namedropping in casual conversation, the blueprint not on-paper but in-memory, the dream that spawned endless self-dialogue. We aren’t even poised as some far-flung adventurer who is passing judgment on the projects of history either. These projects are indeed presented without criticism—they aren’t in ruins, there’s no demented final boss guarding these locations, there’s no voiceover that’s trying to guide us to view them as vanities of all vanities. It is in fact a little misleading to talk about this aspect so much because insane_gazebo doesn’t even draw attention to it as Something to Be Admired— he takes that they’re worth and beauty is self-evidently observable.
And you know what? He’s fucking right—maybe there’s something inherently “worth it” about the concept of the life-project. I don't have a strong argument for this, and maybe I don't need to since I'm on a video game hobbyist website, but engaging in any project of research, creativity, or expression is a good in and of itself. That too relates back into what Sunder is: a perpetual project for a nearly 30 year old game that after 12 years of development is just now over it's halfway point. Maybe for most of those years Sunder wasn’t in insane_gazebo’s mind, but maps 15-19 certainly feel like insane_gazebo’s thoughts for the past decade. They are unapologetically long, nuanced, surreal, engaging, and deranged. The README file for the WAD details as much: “Long ago I had a vision...”, “In my dream I saw that...”, “So in my head...”. A brain spilled on canvas.
In spite of it all though, playing Sunder felt thoroughly unpretentious and just fun. It is after all a game that, unless your a doomgod, will likely take 30+ hours to complete, with many of those hours spent reloading combat encounters until you ekk out the correct path. Yet beating the WAD as-is won't get you anything--there's no sequel, there's no end credits, there’s no capital M message, nothing even remotely climatic. There's not even a relevant Discourse where beating Sunder will get you a crumb of clout. For most people beating Sunder will become as much of a project as making it was, complete with its own requirements for determination, research, and intuition. A Problem to Be Solved, for sure. And yet, this aspect of finding projects, problems, hobbies, ideas, and obscurities to obsessively tinker about over and over for no particular reason is what makes life interesting, and is why that in spite of the cornucopia of things happening in my life, solving Sunder’s rooms became a past-time both in my head and in the world. This is perhaps, more than cosmic power level stuff, where Bethesda lost me the most with the new lore—the transition from doomguy to Doom Slayer turns his demon-slaying project, an expression of idiosyncrasy and circumstance, into a matter of all-importance. He doesn’t kill demons because it’s fun, or because he thinks its important, or because he has something to protect, or simply because it gives him something to think about it—he kills demons because long ago the cosmic rolling ball set off events that trapped in him in his Sisyphean, Godlike wrath. A perpetual motion machine disguised as the janitor of the universe. He even does it for free!
What a project. If whatever Bethesda was doing in the lore of Doom Eternal and The Ancient Gods is to be taken seriously, Sunder is a jaded boomer chiming in with a welcome "it's not that deep" and reasserting that doomguy is first and foremost, a guy. Obviously the Brutalism/Neo-Gothic aesthetic help counter the conceit that an individual could be of cosmic importance, but really the pedestrian aspect of doomguy is most plainly reinforced through the WAD's combat. Maps 1-14 reiterate that DOOM Is Hell, and so the room design is less neat arenas designed for efficient circlestrafing and instead asymmetric, incongruent hazardrooms designed to fuck over intruders, i.e. you. Map 5 is really egregious with the "hazard" part of that philosophy but in general completing a Sunder map requires erasing the mental map of DOOM’s geography hithertho, and instead engaging with the world laid out before us. It flies in the face of typical DOOM convention to have inescapable pits, instant-death platforming, and damaging floors on every would-be safe space, but it's in here all the same. Also noticeable that insane_gazebo doesn't even really employ crushers, DOOM's intended environmental hazard, for this to work—since you can’t even flip the environment on the demons, it’s only doomguy who struggles to move in this world.
Sunder transforms this combat philosophy into something profound in maps 15-19—the theme of environment-as-enemy continues in this set but we also find insane_gazebo using more targeted and choreographed encounters. Generally in slaughter-based mapsets, you’ll see encounters where around 100+ Hell Knights + Revenants drop in an open area with a BFG to clear them out; in this set however, you’ll find not only stereotypical slaughter encounters but also encounters in very tight rooms, with more frequent “problem enemies” such as Archvilles, Pain Elementals, or Cyberdemons joining in with typical Hell Knight + Revenant combo. You think this might be a return to combat that is more doomguy-centric, but nope, it's even more alienating. The reason being is that the key element of slaughter-maps, the BFG, is just straight up unavailable for most of the maps in this set until the very end. Thus, in an inversion of power, Cyberdemon infighting becomes the new BFG--the intended clears of some rooms in this stretch will have Cyberdemons picking up more kills than doomguy! what the fuck! I've never seen something like it outside of some self-designated challenge and puzzle maps. Sunder’s combat truly felt like something different when I realized that doomguy wasn’t the most dangerous person in the room.
The "doomguy ain't shit" narrative also bleeds over into the aesthetic in this set. Aesthetics which can only be described as Bronze Age Temple Architecture combined with surreal Futurism combined with the Neo-Gothicism of the early levels. And a Beehive motif? IDK what fukken architecture movements I should pull on to sell the point here, I dropped the Annotated Mona Lisa 50 pages in, the levels are genuinely imposing and uniquely beautiful is what I’m saying here. Anyone who has loaded map 15 and stepped out the first room can tell you how immediately insignificant they feel. This invocation of things grander than doomguy is also in this set's 'lore' so to speak--unlike Sunlust's reference to religious ritual and violent machinery, Sunder's evocations are all to mythology, from both Sunder's world and our world. "Archives of the Technomancer", "Whispers of the Gnarled King" and the openly blunt "Babylon's Chimera" are all titles which summon historical specters across the maps, hinting at a chronology of how we ended up here at this time fighting these demons, a chronology that doomguy has nothing to do with.
It is with that realization is where I felt that Sunder as a whole became profound to me. Sure we are nominally the protagonist in these maps, the one who sets everything in motion and clears out the enemies, but it’s hard to look at the encounters, the buildings, the titles, and the grand scale of these maps and surmise that they are still about doomguy. The only thing that can be fairly surmised is that the locations here, their vastness in history and architecture, were the life-projects of somebody else. The thought that broke their sleep schedule, the idea they couldn't stop namedropping in casual conversation, the blueprint not on-paper but in-memory, the dream that spawned endless self-dialogue. We aren’t even poised as some far-flung adventurer who is passing judgment on the projects of history either. These projects are indeed presented without criticism—they aren’t in ruins, there’s no demented final boss guarding these locations, there’s no voiceover that’s trying to guide us to view them as vanities of all vanities. It is in fact a little misleading to talk about this aspect so much because insane_gazebo doesn’t even draw attention to it as Something to Be Admired— he takes that they’re worth and beauty is self-evidently observable.
And you know what? He’s fucking right—maybe there’s something inherently “worth it” about the concept of the life-project. I don't have a strong argument for this, and maybe I don't need to since I'm on a video game hobbyist website, but engaging in any project of research, creativity, or expression is a good in and of itself. That too relates back into what Sunder is: a perpetual project for a nearly 30 year old game that after 12 years of development is just now over it's halfway point. Maybe for most of those years Sunder wasn’t in insane_gazebo’s mind, but maps 15-19 certainly feel like insane_gazebo’s thoughts for the past decade. They are unapologetically long, nuanced, surreal, engaging, and deranged. The README file for the WAD details as much: “Long ago I had a vision...”, “In my dream I saw that...”, “So in my head...”. A brain spilled on canvas.
In spite of it all though, playing Sunder felt thoroughly unpretentious and just fun. It is after all a game that, unless your a doomgod, will likely take 30+ hours to complete, with many of those hours spent reloading combat encounters until you ekk out the correct path. Yet beating the WAD as-is won't get you anything--there's no sequel, there's no end credits, there’s no capital M message, nothing even remotely climatic. There's not even a relevant Discourse where beating Sunder will get you a crumb of clout. For most people beating Sunder will become as much of a project as making it was, complete with its own requirements for determination, research, and intuition. A Problem to Be Solved, for sure. And yet, this aspect of finding projects, problems, hobbies, ideas, and obscurities to obsessively tinker about over and over for no particular reason is what makes life interesting, and is why that in spite of the cornucopia of things happening in my life, solving Sunder’s rooms became a past-time both in my head and in the world. This is perhaps, more than cosmic power level stuff, where Bethesda lost me the most with the new lore—the transition from doomguy to Doom Slayer turns his demon-slaying project, an expression of idiosyncrasy and circumstance, into a matter of all-importance. He doesn’t kill demons because it’s fun, or because he thinks its important, or because he has something to protect, or simply because it gives him something to think about it—he kills demons because long ago the cosmic rolling ball set off events that trapped in him in his Sisyphean, Godlike wrath. A perpetual motion machine disguised as the janitor of the universe. He even does it for free!