Except, letting otp save Christmas?!! Damnit ionous, you're forcing my hand! 

Negke successfully coerced into releasing a new map. 

That was my fav of the pack. Newer mappers should study it for proper gameplay inspiration. 

So far I only tried Bal's. I liked the gimmick. IN addition, I liked the gameplay side effects of the gimmick: it makes it safe to fall in the void, it gives you more opportunities to retreat from a bad position and re-engage enemies from a different vector, and finally, it opens up the map to free exploration so the player is restricted only by their understanding of the space rather than physical barriers. The text file was a nice touch too. 

Thanks metl!
Yeah it kind of gives it a deathmatch feel, where you can try to escape from combat when you're not feeling it.
I threw a few surprises in there for people ready to think outside the box (pun completely intended).

I think the gimmick could be pushed a bit more on a non 1024^3 constrained map, it's a bit of work though getting all the duplicate stuff working right (all the breakables, doors, etc. have to work right in the copies).
Also Sock had projectiles kind of working with the instant teleporters, but we were getting a lot of crashes. Making those work consistently would be fun with grenade spam from the ogres.

Have yet to really play the rest of the maps, so for now all I'll say is that Strideh's visuals give me a hard-on (as usual). 

Eternal Return by Bal

Basically what metl said really, except I'd like to add that the bottom floor of the construct was a particularly brilliant bit, how you get to the upper part of it simply by exiting and reentering.

Definitely a big fan of a new spin on the good and old Kingpin textures, had that 20-years-of-professional-experience touch to it. Would like to see a full map with a fully expanded/retouched set eventually, maybe after that one map with a fully expanded/retouched q2base set is out. That's assuming the map with a fully expanded/retouched dkt3 set doesn't get in the way...

I enjoyed playing this one - definitely your best gameplay effort so far - so much that I ended up wishing for more by the end. But on my second playthrough (not captured) it turned out there actually was more all along??

Also, props for having the foresight to completely disable falling damage. A lesser mapper would probably have made my kneecaps implode with each loopfall. (This one will be 2021's Word of the Year)

I would rank this above both your entries from 18 and 17. Well done. 

All is Dust by Entsoy by Entsoy

Between this and your Halloween map (which if people are unaware, was probably my favorite from that entire pack), it's safe to say nobody does post-ap in Quake better than you.

However, it really shows that there was no time to test this map. :(

I kept dying so many times, even after dropping to skill 1, that I ended up using god mode in the end, which is a real shame because I was ready to get properly immersed in this mournful, ashen ruin.

I don't even think this needed all that much work to be brought to good shape, since the ideas are good (well, except for all the Zombies), but just needed a good round of fine tuning.

I really want to see a map from you that isn't constrained by a deadline. :) 

Some misc notes...

- I probably won't be playing and/or reviewing every map in the pack, sorry. There's a hard limit on both my patience and my will to live.

- I'm just using the console to launch each map individually, because the start map is just the perfect storm of cramped, bumpy, and AMID EVIL©™ in terms of colored lighting. 

Enjoyed it immensely! It took me a couple of times to complete it "properly," but the end was worth it! Some of the props needed to get back to the top accidentally got destroyed on my first few tries. Also, there was some strange in-fighting in another try: monsters on the floor above me were targetting each other even though I couldn't see them. Fun stuff! 

Just finished. I wrote up waffles over on discord, but I should probably copy them over to here too when I get time.

I'll copy ionotp's first since otp abandoned discord lol:
@ionous and @otp
The Presents: Amazing oldschool microlevels. Just great! Typical ionous gameplay which has a very id1 feel to it usually. Not sure how you are so consistent but it's great. Wonderful secret sprinkling. Otp wuz here!
The Coal: Jumping to the metal train it triggered and moved away before I could land on it...needed a tad bit of delay.

I'll also add that the cave bit really reminded me of the expanded cut beginning cave to the Dismal Oubliette so that was cool.