OK I'm REALLY late to the party on this one but I wanted to drop in with some love for Ionous' map that I just played. I got stuck for a while after the 3rd tome, like others apparently, but when I _did_ figure it out that was quite cool.

I guess along with "players don't look up" (which Quake vets are at least partially trained out of) you can add the truism "players don't look down". :-)

(That experience actually helped me in a later spot where looking down was again required for progression.)

The hunting-around-and-exploring feel was handled well IMO. It's good that it was in a small map so you could run around and examine everything pretty quickly. Also I don't underestimate the value of the initial tone-setting from the design of the opening area and a few bits of text.

Anyway, I don't blame anyone that got stuck/frustrated, but it ended up being a very satisfying map for me. 

Hmm got a weird blocky blue-and-white skin for an ogre in Maxx's map. Using QSS on Linux. No errors in the console. Curious. I think this is a normal QS behavior for a bad skin reference but I didn't see anyone else mention that? 

Thanks for the kind words. Glad that sticking with it paid off; the difficult paths of progression were intentional.