#608: Mausoleum Nefarium
A solid and yet familiar Gothic romp
Initial release: July 1, 2022
Platform: PC (Doom mapset for limit-removing ports)
Developer: Doomer Boards
Mods used: Walpurgis 0.99 (playing as Myrmidon); MMDoom v0.8 (set to Dark monsters); Flashlight++ 9.1 (set to lamp preset)
Say what you will about the Doomer Boards — and plenty has been said already — they know how to make a Doom wad over there. Since March 2018 they’ve pumped out a whopping sixty-seven wads in the Doomer Boards Project series, with a sixty-eighth on the way as of this writing and almost certainly more to come down the line. (I wonder what they’ll do for DBP69?) DBP37: AUGER;ZENITH afforded them a bit of mainstream community fame and positive attention for once, and in the year since, they gradually refined their output with new ideas and themes. While DBP49: Mausoleum Nefarium isn’t the most original thing they’ve ever done, it nevertheless is a solid entry and definitely a return to form after the debacle over DBP48 — the less said about that one, the better.
Looking objectively at Mausoleum Nefarium’s aesthetic, I can’t help but think about GothicDM and the many texture sets that it inspired. Being quite frank, the Doom community has long flown close to the sun (as msx2plus so succinctly put it in a recent thread) with regards to ripping resources from commercial products. The boomer shooter community has done it for years, and it’s not just Doom. There are Duke Nukem 3D mods out there that use textures and sprites from Blood, Shadow Warrior, and even Strife. Quake mappers have used textures from Hexen II and Daikatana (all else aside, that game had some good medieval textures, so I understand.) And of course the Doom community lifts from just about everywhere: Wolfenstein, other Doom games, Heretic and Hexen, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Half-Life, if it’s a shooter or even just a 3D RPG made between 1992 and 2003 it’s probably had its textures and/or sprites ripped wholesale for use in a Doom wad somewhere. A lot of these have wound up in one form or another in the various Gothic-inspired texture packs.
But that’s kinda the thing isn’t it? In the quarter century since the official Gothic texture pack hit /idgames, the regular output of rehashes and variants arguably have by this point collectively become a sort of dark fantasy slurry that’s become almost generic, up there with “vanilla edit” texture packs and — sorry not sorry — OTEX. In general it’s probably most similar to Quake’s weird Lovecraftian gothic style (most obvious in “runic”-themed maps) but I often spot textures from Heretic and the Hexens (Heretic II never seems to rate.) I suppose it makes sense, given that the Gothic genre of texture sets relies heavily on similar dark fantasy and medieval aesthetics as Quake and Heretic/Hexen. While I do enjoy this aesthetic — I find it overall more interesting than Doom’s vanilla medieval and hell-style textures, though they certainly mesh well with the Gothic style when used correctly — I also agree with the sense in the community that it’s seen some amount of oversaturation.
Mausoleum Nefarium is deeply rooted in this kind of aesthetic. It’s not the only DBP release to do so — I can point to close to a dozen of them that lean heavily on the Gothic theme (Morbid Autumn being probably the best example.) Now, granted, it changes things up a lot, leaning heavily on a grey, blue and green color palette, with the sky being a quite lovely foggy, moonlit forest. The sepulchral maps — 11 in all — blaze with blue flames, illuminating grey stone and green marble and the stained glass windows and other gothic features that give these levels their character. Mausoleum also comes with an optional feature that turns the flames from lost souls blue (and they glow blue in GZDoom!) as well as pain elementals, fitting in better with the wad’s aesthetic. Cool!
(Disclaimer: I played through this using the excellent Walpurgis , playing as the Myrmidon with Dimensional Instability mode turned off and using the MMDoom mod which replaces the vanilla monsters with creatures from some of the Might & Magic games, as well as Flashlight++ 9.1 with the Lamp preset. MMDoom allows you to pick from one of three factions for the monsters, so I picked the “Dark” faction, with its undead, demons and creepy crawlies seeming fitting. The CGI nature of the sprites might not necessarily fit in well with the Doom aesthetic, but they do call to mind old 90s first-person RPGs and dungeon crawlers. I did watch a vanilla playthrough on Youtube to get a better sense of how the wad plays on its own.)
In spite of the overly familiar theme, Mausoleum is a welcome, if relatively quick, play. As is usually the case with DBP, most of these maps are designed to be burned through in ten minutes or less. As such they’re not typically very large or possessed of a lot of enemies (though MAP09, MattFright’s “Diamond Stronghold,” is a major exception, an epic time worthy of a bigger project.) The mapping team this time around consists of DBP regulars Jon “40oz” Vail (who headed up the project,) kvsari, BiZ, and matador, and relative newcomers mayhemicdestrvctor, glikkzy, Adam “gibbon” Bilbrough, and last but not least, MattFright.
DBP can sometimes be a mixed bag, and Mausoleum is no different. While MattFright’s map is unimpeachable, mayhemicdestrvctor’s two contributions are very basic and small, and one of them is outright incomplete. Most of the others sit somewhere between that range, though I’m not particularly enamored of gibbon’s MAP08, “Temeratum Palatium.” There are a couple of interesting moments such as glikkzy sending you through a portal into an alternately-textured version of the tomb complex you just went through in MAP05: “Chiral Keep,” or navigating the watery ruins of BiZ’s “Vestigial Shrine” on MAP06, but for the most part, it’s pretty straightforward Doom action, and most of the maps make extremely good use of the texture pack.
I had a good time with Mausoleum Nefarium. While the Gothic aesthetic is certainly well-worn at this point, Mausoleum’s take on it is relatively fresh, creepy and unsettling, reminding me of “Down Among Dead Men” in the classic Thief2X mod for Thief II: the Metal Age. I had fun and I think you will too.
-june❤
DBP49: Mausoleum Nefarium can be downloaded on Doomworld.
