LILITH.PK3

Data is a fragile thing. Whether it's due to an untimely electrical surge, your ancient struggling hardware finally expiring, or even just an embarrassing spill of your favorite soft drink, something bad can easily happen to your storage devices. Most pertinently, your files can become corrupted, and in severe cases this can be quite dramatic: Text becomes absolutely scrambled, images become an eye-straining mess of melted rainbow pixels, and your system's most basic functionality might just be entirely inaccessible. Some important piece of code can end up missing, replaced with binary gibberish. An array of decimals vital to actually reading your data is not as it should be, and your computer simply can't make enough sense of it to understand what it's supposed to be doing... But it still has those safeguards, those harrowing error messages telling it that this data can not be read. Even if the text is garbled, the error will almost always show, and the computer will know to terminate the failing processes. But what if those safeguards weren't there? What if the process never terminated, and it persisted to run code that was messed up beyond recovery?
"i like to keep my doom 2 installation floppies attached to my computer with magnets so i don't lose them"
With lilith.pk3, mod developer Anotak takes us into such a process: A severely-mistreated copy of Doom II. As the story goes, the installation floppies of this innocent violent videogame were ravaged by magnets, reducing it to a visual cacophony of jumbled graphics and distorted geometry, a jittering twitching mess that only vaguely resembles the classic Doom we know and love. Though it looks like a heap of garbage, in making extensive use/abuse of various flaws and bugs in the classic ZDoom Software Renderer, lilith.pk3 takes the visual nonsense and turns it into a finely-tuned piece of glitch art heaven. Every exploit and hall-of-mirrors effect is used to the fullest to craft a surreal art gallery for the player to lose themselves in, evoking a feeling akin to having to adjust to the physics of a confusing alien reality. A world that seems impossible at first glance, yet has clear rules you can learn to follow. It almost demands a certain familiarity with the source material. Knowing what Doom is supposed to be like leaves you with an intensely uncanny feeling as you struggle to parse this ghost of its former self. If you don't already know how the main menu looks you may have to squint hard before you can even start the game - though Anotak has taken care to make sure that it's JUST understandable enough for you to proceed. In fact, ALL of lilith.pk3 seems to work like that. Therein lies a significant part of the inherent genius of lilith.pk3: It's not just an ordinary map pack obfuscated in warped corridors and flashing colors. It seems like it should be utterly incomprehensible, yet it makes an eerie amount of sense. You are barraged with bizarre pieces of modern art floating in the middle of the room, shards of textures strewn about haphazardly as if the game itself was falling apart piece by piece, and maps sometimes loop in on themselves to create metaphysical navigation puzzles to boggle the mind... and yet through it all I always knew what was a door and what wasn't. I knew what was cover and what was merely a figment of the engine's imagination. I found myself getting lost only one time in my entire playthrough, and that's only because I didn't realize I already collected one of the keys I needed. This is in stark contrast to the hours I've found myself stumbling around aimlessly in many regular Doom II levels - and that's without flickering textures and walls clipping into other walls. Naturally, if you play until you have the maps memorized you can blaze through them with no problem, but I never had to memorize lilith.pk3. I played, I took in my surroundings, and I figured them out. I am usually not particularly great at physical navigation, and the fact I had such a good time with lilith.pk3 feels like it speaks to its quality. As far as I'm concerned, lilith.pk3's level design is better than most official Doom maps - though this an incredibly subjective opinion and not at all a solid fact.
Looks about right.
Where its aesthetic does interfere with gameplay, it does so with a purpose. Enemies are constantly flashing between different chunks of sprites, sometimes seeming to blend into their surroundings as though they were naturally camouflaged. It forces you to adapt, to listen, and to look very, very closely at a world that was not meant to be visualized. Soon enough it becomes second nature and you understand exactly what is coming for you, even as the walls melt around you and the doors open and shut without rhythm as if a vengeful poltergeist were haunting the crumbling halls of this dying software. Each step forward seems to invite a new type of glitchy erratic behavior from the environment as the floor begins to shift and you get pushed around by the currents of the air. Every buggy effect just serves as a brand new game mechanic that you have to figure out and learn how to fight against. A good example of this is the fact that while there isn't a single new monster asset in the whole mod, it tweaks them in such a way that standard old imps and demons take on interesting new forms you won't expect. The ones in "Map06: CRC Failed" are personal favorites of mine, though I won't spoil that here if you haven't already given this mod a try by now.
lilith.pk3 takes aspects of data loss, program errors and glitches to their terrifying extreme. The first thing you hear when you boot the game up is a grinding rhythm, a screeching howl, as though the game itself were crying out in pain. Of course, the original Midi music system could never produce such a noise - When you speed it up in editing software, you find it's just the Doom II menu theme slowed down & volume boosted. It is not a realistic emulation of a broken program, but it's not trying to be. What it does do is it puts together common ideas of what makes glitches what they are to excellent effect, and despite the clear epilepsy warning at the start of the mod briefly breaking the illusion the game takes you into its oddly entrancing world from the very first moment you drop in. When you enter the first real map of the game, you are presented with a faint ghostly wind and a haunting reverb effect that bounces every sound you make off of the "walls". You are stepping into ruins, desolate and hollow. You are treading on software that's been hurt, and it's almost like it's retaliating in anger. Between maps, reversed music accompanies ominous error messages. Picking up rocket ammo prompts the game to tell you "FOLLOW MODE ON FOLLOW MODE ON" - A text string appearing in the wrong place, or a warning that something is after you...? You know it's just a glitchy mess, but it always feels like something's even more wrong than it already is. Text is garbled in a believable way, yet lines are put together in such sequence that it seems like it's trying to tell you something. You don't feel safe. You know it's just a mod, you know everything's deliberately designed, but you still find yourself thinking, "Why won't this Arch-vile stop screaming?" And right as you begin to wonder why the mod is called "lilith", the mod nears its conclusion. It teases you with a possibility, dangling the beginning of an answer in your face, and... Just like that, the mod is over.
lilith.pk3 is an exquisite mod that combines everything I personally love about corruptions, glitch art and good old-fashioned haunted videogame creepypastas. It's fun, it's confusing, it's deeply unsettling, and it's one of my favorite mods in a long long time. You may have a harder time with lilith.pk3 than I did, and neither I nor Anotak recommend this mod to anyone who suffers from photosensitive epilepsy or the like, but I absolutely suggest you try lilith.pk3 if you love horror, glitchy aesthetics, or just plain stressful shooter fun. Just one piece of friendly advice: Consider turning on auto-aim.
lilith.pk3 (release candidate 1) can be downloaded here: https://doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/j-l/lilith Follow Anotak on twitter: https://twitter.com/FEFF2800