Sadistic map, full on chunky brutal arenas with gauntlets to navigate between them. All adrenaline, no contemplation, no respite!
The first Fiend-jump set a tone of dodging excessive punishment, which is what I did from start to finish: circling to distract with infighting, then slaloming to lead corridor obstructions to one side, before swerving them on the other. It's difficult to know when to drop out of that kind of evasion mode, but the openness of the arenas and the tightness corridors didn't give much respite so I just kept running! Not a dull moment. I really enjoy the single-mindedness of these kinds of map, they're rare.
I really loved the slowly unlocking spiral mechanism to access the final arena (slow opening mechanisms are a great way to modulate panic), but elsewhere architectural detail irked me a bit. There's a chunkyness and scale that's relatively consistent throughout but the mechanism that allows exit from the silver key room requires a level of scrutiny on the surfaces that isn't rewarded elsewhere. A lot of the decorative tecture facets — especially the non-id1 ones — also felt incongruous: the runic metal theme is otherwise very consistent and strong, and the urge to decorate the brutal minimalism with an ad-hoc assortment of pictures feels misjudged IMO, especially so because a lot of these colourful details are more distinctive and distracting than the non-standard buttons.
