We’re really in the final stretch, folks, and Going Down is one I’ve meant to check out for eight years now.
Outside of the Doom community, Going Down’s creator Cyriak Harris was already pretty well-known by 2014. In fact, if you’ve spent any time on the weirder side of YouTube, you’ve assuredly seen at least one of his bizarre, mesmerizing music videos. “cows & cows & cows” currently has about 68 million views, and that’s not even Cyriak’s most popular video.
If those videos are your only experience with Cyriak, you may actually find Going Down to be rather tame by comparison, and far more comprehensible than you might have expected. Its premise is simple and concise, taking Doomguy on a mission to exterminate 30 floors of demons from a high-rise building. With precious few exceptions, each map begins and ends on an elevator as you work your way from the roof down to the ground floor, into the basement, and through quite a few more than just nine circles of Hell.
That all may sound relatively normal as far as Doom WADs go, but the normalcy of a cityscape and office building is what makes Cyriak’s weird touch even more fascinating when it starts to show. I was honestly rebuffed at least two or three times when I tried to get into this mapset over the years, and it was entirely the fault of the first couple maps. Things get off to such an uninteresting start that you might be fooled into thinking Going Down is some boring “My Office” WAD from the ’90s, stuffed with an absurd number of hitscanners to represent the creator’s coworkers — with no regard for playability.
By map03, though, you should start to catch on to the fact that something odd is going on. This is not the unfocused product of an office worker from 25 years ago, nor is it the work of a practiced and disciplined community member. I think I’ve said it before, but I’m thoroughly intrigued every time someone from outside the “scene” bursts in and dumps a meaty project like this. They’re so uninhibited by the usual expectations, the familiar dos and don’ts, and carry none of that baggage from years of feedback from jaded veterans. It’s creators like Cyriak who inject desperately needed new vitality into our community, and revitalize the rest of us in the process.
The things that Cyriak is able to do with the vanilla texture set are eye-popping. He leverages his experience as an animator here, channeling early styles of animation in the way that he cuts and splices, repeats and twists and morphs the Doom textures to create what feel like completely new resources. And it all gets more outlandish as you ride that elevator deeper, a fever dream that begins pleasantly enough with adorable Doomcute trash bins and office chairs, and culminates in living architecture, bleeding orifices, and hints of beings whose scale is beyond your imagining.
Once you’re deep enough into the mapset, sufficiently duped by its humble beginnings, that’s when Cyriak goes full Saw on your ass. Every map is a Rube Goldberg machine of suffering, one sadistic ambush after another after another. You enter a sort of trance, a madness where you’re almost giggling to yourself as you die over and over. You get to know the telltale signs of a Cyriak trap and yet you keep falling for them. Every time you go to grab the tiniest boon to help against the onslaught you’re up against, or you duck into some alcove you thought would be safe for just a moment, you just have to laugh when your reward is the Doom equivalent of a piano dropping on your head.
I don’t know whether Going Down is really that funny — so much more so than any other mapset that actually tries to be — or if I merely lost my marbles playing it. The WAD is as oppressive as it is delightful. The pandemonium of some of the fights, combined with discordant music out of a clown’s worst nightmare, builds to an unbearable crescendo. It all threatens to overwhelm the senses and then suddenly —
…peace. You’ve finished off the last arch-vile and the map goes quiet. It’s over, just like that. But somehow you can’t wait for the next one.
Going Down requires DOOM2.WAD and runs on Boom-compatible ports. If you’re not sure how to get it running, this may help. And for more awesome WADs, be sure to check these out!
