Some maps gain fame by being infamous, or so they say. Well, who cares about some dumb saying, let's look at an IWAD map that won over plenty of hearts, and caused many hardships at the same time. That map is none other than The Chasm, MAP24 of Doom II, created by the one author everyone loves to pick on the most: Sandy Petersen.
The paraphrased description of this map is a huge expansive cavern, with numerous amounts of nukage below, plus lots of thin walkways that need to be traversed. So this is certainly a map that emphasizes verticality in a strange way, but was easily among the first maps in FPSs to actually incorporate it as such. It's those walkways in particular that made novice players feel like quitting, as balancing was quite hard for those who could only do so via the keyboard. Even more, you couldn't save while on the walkways, because if you load a game, you'll fall through the walkways in vanilla Doom. But at the same time, the challenges of doing so are rewarding. Falling in upon a misstep is bad, but there's usually teleporters to help in most cases. Exceptions are the lava pit around the plasma gun, the central platform before the teleporter to the final area, and the final nukage area itself. These three are nasty in particular, because of the enemies that show up, with cacodemons and lost souls emerging from the bottom. It is also these bridges that are perhaps the thinnest, as the bridges west of the plasma gun are a bit wider, along with the bridge you see at the start and the other bridges to the south of the complex.
Another amazing thing about The Chasm is that more than half of the level is really optional. The quick way to beat this level involves going across the starting bridge, entering the blue key building and getting the key, running all the way to the blue key door, traversing the bridges to the north teleporter, then doing the final area and the blue room with the red key, then crossing the last few bridges, and the exit. So the rest of the level, including the northwest half, the large central complex, and an area at the end of the platforms that actually unlocks the way to the complex itself, are entirely optional. Yet there's quite a lot in terms of supplies and secrets you'd wanna get, and Sandy gives us all the ample opportunities to explore, provided we get the radiation suits and keep to them as much as possible.
Finally, The Chasm has one of the most questionable secrets ever that I've ever seen. The one in question is the invulnerability sitting on a lower perch near a square bridge, with lava underneath it. It seems that this invulnerability is really nothing but a red herring. That's cause you can pick it up, then the floor below will slowly rise to reach the rest, but by then the invulnerability has worn off. There's two tricks I've read on how to get the invulnerability and utilize it. The first is to start by getting the radiation suit nearby on the higher platform, then jump into the lava pit and repeatedly press the outer walls until you are at the level of the invulnerability, then grab it. The other is to jump to the invulnerability and move around on it, but not collect it until you see the floor has risen up quite a bit. But even with these proper strategies of getting the invulnerability and getting off in a fashionable manner, what good could it be used on? The Chasm seems to not have that much in actual combat, although the lost souls far to the north could be a challenge, and maybe the area to the right too, there's just not a really good area to make use of the invulnerability.
And those are the big beauties of The Chasm. It's a level that drops a new and interesting perspective that manages to be a roadblock for some, and it entertains the player because even after quitting or beating it several times, it still feels like there's much more to it, some of it useful optional stuff, other times it's a red herring.
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