City Gates

While the cityscape looks like the Canadian city of Toronto, it is fairly clear that the portal did not take the player to Earth. At least not this dimension's Earth. Still, with no real alternatives, it is probably best to humor Charles and find a way into the city. Trying not to give too much away here, but if you can't go over, around, or through something, the only alternative left is to go under.

The sewer system is extremely poorly designed, but considering where you are this should not come as too big of a surprise. The 3D sewers use my raycasting engine meaning that you move though them with 360 degrees of freedom. Thankfully, I never had the time to implement traps or monsters to chase the player so just solving a maze is your only issue. I was nice enough to provide an automap feature so this is not as hard as it could have been.

During the design phase of this game, I was considering having traps and monsters in the game. I had traps in episode 31 which in my opinion didn't really work that well. The problem was that killing the player with no warning, even with the option to keep the automap, is frustrating to the player. Players simply do not want to lose.

The idea to have monsters, some type of demon-rat most likely, chasing the players was my next consideration. The problem here is that the game really has avoided player violence so introducing combat was not desirable nor was having the players defenseless against the rats. In hindsight, there was the option of having the player be defenseless against the rats but having something, such as rotting meat, that the player could use to neutralize the rats. Needless to say, if I was going to redo this episode I would add demon-rats and something to neutralize them.