Memento Mori (PC) review "In my house, classic Doom will never die. "

It's tough for me to view many games as being more influential than Doom. Not only did it greatly improve on iD Software's earlier game, Wolfenstein 3D, and lay the groundwork for the success of the first-person shooter genre, but the immediate impact of both it and its sequel, Doom II were amazing.

When releasing them, iD also gave fans access to their source code, allowing people to show off their level-designing skills and leading to tons of fan-made works becoming accessible online. All one had to do was have one of the Dooms on their computer and they'd be able to play all sorts of .wad files — both individual levels and partial or full replacements for entire games.

As one might guess, some of those were total crap; while others were really, really good, with several of the latter doing wonders to give their creators exposure. When iD released Final Doom, both 32-level collections included were made by fan groups, with at least two of the more prominent creators, Dario and Milo Casali, gaining some degree of prominence in the industry — Dario, in particular, being credited on games such as Quake and Half-Life.

Before getting their foot in the door with iD, the Casalis, as well as many other aspiring designers, were making their bones in the fan community with Memento Mori, a collection derived from Doom II that tends to be quickly mentioned whenever people talk about the best of the classic .wads. While it might have a few issues with bugs not present in its inspiration, it's still easy to see why it earned such praise.

Memento Mori could best be described as Doom II on steroids. You'll first notice this as soon as you start a new game and begin its initial level, The Teleporter. The first level in Doom II begins in a room containing two of the basic pistol-wielding soldiers standing with their backs to you. Here, it's much the same thing, except there are five baddies to make that initial confrontation trickier to overcome unscathed.

Throughout the entirety of this level pack, you'll see the programmers endeavoring to make a bigger and better Doom. Levels often are larger and more complex than those created by iD, while several confrontations prove to be more intense. With a diverse group of designers, this game's levels can wildly vary, making it impossible to predict what sort of challenge you'll face from stage to stage.

For example, the three designed by Jens Nielsen ranked as some of my favorites due to their intricacy. He'll put tons of switches in his levels and you'll be running around hitting them and then figuring out what each one does. Sad as it may be to admit it, but the first time I played his first offering, The Stand, it took me FOREVER to reach the exit simply due to missing one switch and having to meander aimlessly for what felt like hours in a seemingly futile attempt to discover what had gone wrong.

A bit later, in Not That Simple, he came up with a disappearing maze. One part of the map is a fairly complex arrangement of corridors that seem to lead nowhere. Until you find a switch and realize that it lowered a couple walls. Wash, rinse and repeat while occasionally fighting monsters and you'll eventually be in a wide open area with a few heavy-hitting foes and one of those ever-so-necessary keys.

Finally, his late-game City of the Unavenged might be the best city-themed level I've played. That style, which typically gives you a handful of buildings strewn across a landscape, tends to be my favorite when done right. And this is more than right. Amazingly complex and utterly loaded with opposition, it can take an eternity to simply clear out the enemies making walking outside a very hazardous proposition — and you'll still have a lot of buildings to explore and a seemingly-infinite number of switches to activate.

In contract, we have Milo Casali's Showdown. Like in the works of Nielsen, you'll progress through this level by blasting monsters and then hitting a switch to access a new area. However, there's next-to-no "puzzle-solving" in doing this. Instead, you'll regularly find yourself going up against massive onslaughts of tough foes. More than once, I wished there was an option to undo hitting a switch because that thing would lower a wall and leave me facing an army of Revenants or Barons of Hell. At least Milo was kind enough to leave enough ammo to kill every damn thing multiple times over — something that might be necessary, as he's not shy about throwing a lot of enemy-resurrecting Arch-Viles into the mix as you get close to the exit.

Right after that one, you have Dario's contribution, Diehard. While it also has a couple big fights, its design is a bit more sadistic. You'll spend a lot of time on narrow pathways above damage-floor pits being sniped by distant foes while also occasionally triggering well-executed traps that force you into tough confrontations with little room to maneuver. It's one of those claustrophobic levels where you'll need to have eyes in the back of your head because no matter where you are, you'll likely be vulnerable to some degree.

And there are many more great levels here. House of Thorn starts you out in a very cramped building littered with narrow halls and tiny rooms before releasing you into a larger, more open, yard. Karmacoma is a fairly large level that peaks with you in a building under siege from dozens of monsters brought into the fray by that damnable switch you had to trigger. Twilight Lab is one of the more enjoyable and intricate examples of the tech-lab style of design. Both of the game's secret levels, Technology Base and The Hidden Slime Factory were very well done, as virtually everything you do plays a role in new areas and monsters becoming accessible.

Honestly, those two should have been in the base 30, as opposed to only being accessible via finding secret exits or using a cheat code. Much like Doom II, there are a few levels here that just don't match up to the rest. The Mansion is another house-themed level, but unlike House of Thorn, it contains large chambers that tend to be sparsely populated, leading to a rather boring experience. Kinetics was just an overall annoying level. There were a few good parts in it, but it often was overly dark, which is one of my pet peeves when Doom-ing. Island of the Dead seemed to be a pretty decent level, but for some reason an extra red key is accessible right at the beginning. And with that being the one unlocking the way to the exit, this means you can finish the stage without even seeing much of it.

Another issue with having two levels I really liked serving as the secret ones was how this game has a few design flaws and glitches that make it really tough to access them without cheat codes. In the otherwise-excellent Karmacoma, by stepping on a platform to pick up a key, you'll cause a ledge to move to a place where you can use it to reach a previously-inaccessible teleporter leading to the secret exit. Except it might not, as it's triggered to move to a different height depending on what side you walk onto said platform — making it possible that you'll never have the opportunity to reach that teleporter. Then, Technology Base was mostly designed for multi-player and its secret exit is not in the single-player portion of the level. It can be reached, but you'll only have one chance to do so before the necessary platform gets lowered and no longer can be used for that purpose.

Even if Memento Mori is a bit buggier than the Dooms released by iD, it's still quite the feat. There are a lot of great level-making ideas on display in this .wad and many of its levels range from very good to legitimately memorable. I've been big into this stuff since I started playing Doom II back in the mid-90s and I can't see that changing thanks to fan-made level collections such as this one. Even if a few of the levels fell a bit flat, there's more than enough good stuff to attract the attention of any fan of iD's classic shooter.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (March 16, 2022) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.