Artifact - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Artifact is a custom map converted to Sven from Team Fortress Classic. It's a hard as nails platforming map that has me questioning if there is an important change in player movement across games that makes the map harder than it should be.

SCMapDB page

Original map author: Kami

Conversion authors: AdamR

Date of original mod release: 2003

Date of final Sven Map release: 2020

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Artifact

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by dunkelschwamm | July 24, 2022 | 4815 characters

    Artifact is a map that, much like the hidden temples in Indiana Jones, hides peril lurking beneath great beauty. The foliage, the textures for the stone reliefs, the models for the key objects, the waterfalls and giant trees- they all look fantastic. But within, trap brushes swiftly kill players and require hard jumps back to spawn and the backtracking that comes with that.

    Let me just be up front: I didn't beat a single one of these puzzles wherein death was a threat. My teammate and I threw ourselves at these over and over. Often it felt like being just out of line with the solution resulted in swift death and restarting. There's a puzzle which requires jumping across logs in the water, which my teammate and I completed every individual part of, but decided to noclip after lots of frustration. The next was a timing trap where we had to get ourselves to drop into a pit just right after a spike trap triggers, but no matter how we attempted it would get gibbed on something we couldn't even see. Then there's a maze with a bunch of fuck-you collapsing floor instant death pits and a bunch of switches which are required to open the door and continue. After that, there's the swamp trees which are frustrating platforming with barely visible ladders and platforms obscured by giant foliage textures for platforming, while instant death spike traps lower immediately from the canopy atop you and the floor is composed of poisonous water- and that isn't even a puzzle, it's just how you navigate the second half of the map. The last real puzzle requires using another player to turn off fire traps while a player navigates smasher traps. This one is particularly frustrating because the hitboxes on the fire are incredibly unclear. Finally, players find the artifact they're searching for and just have to traverse the entirety of the swamp tree platforming with the artifact to finish the map.

    I'm sure this map is somebody's cup of tea, but it isn't mine. I dig that the map has a cool opening area that's implied to be thousands of miles from the rest of the map. I'm a fan of platforming, I'm a fan of beautiful ruins in the jungle, and I'm even a fan of Indiana Jones style traps. But, those traps work because there's always some clever way to tell they're there- Jones doesn't get by in the movie by taking a hit, dying, and then coming back to the tomb and remembering not to make the fatal mistake again. That's not skill, cleverness, or challenge- that's getting abused until the answer is engrained in your mind. You can defend all day that you find that fun, but I'm having trouble getting over how close that description is to a definition of trauma.

    For all its beauty, I found myself in this map utterly grumpy. No puzzle or trap signposted a goal, a solution, or that they had been figured out after their solution. Simply traversing the map is a chore, and if you're not going to figure out these blind-siding traps on the first try you'll find yourself performing the chore of traversal often. I gave each obstacle course in this map an honest try before cheating, and I feel I paid the map at least as much respect as it pays me.

    You also take damage when you use the teleport checkpoint. It doesn't really matter, since everything in this map is a one-hit-kill, but still a dick move.

    If you're into sadistically hardcore trap/platforming puzzle maps, then good news: this one is all of that and it's gorgeous. Play it with friends, throw it on a server. Just leave me out of it.

Pros:

• Love the intro area
• The whole map is gorgeous and sounds good too
• Some of the puzzle ideas are rather clever
• Always cool to see the inventory system properly implemented

Cons:

• I'm sure it was the intention, but these puzzles are way too tough.
• The traps are not signposted, trigger too fast for a player to react, and often happen in the dark or so fast that the player can't see what they need to learn to not suffer the same fate again
• The ladder vines in the trees are awful and mostly get in the way and cause the player to jump away from the tree which is an awkward and unnatural thing to do in platforming all of a sudden and offers no means for the player to wise up to any trick. It's just shitty design
• The maze in particular is total bullshit, and on top of being a maze does not differentiate the switches within (aside from the ones that kill you when you get near them) meaning players cannot track their progress through the maze
• Too few checkpoints too far apart and often in inconvenient places
• Every aspect of this map is a Sisyphean chore.

Score: 4.5 / 10