Have I got a real feast for your eyes, lovers of ye goode olde Quake!
Called Nullspace, it's a set of five maps ingenious in their minimalism and twisted weirdness.
Yes, this is what you see, exactly: the concrete blocks hung in white foggy nothingness for you to hop around, as though in a brutalist skyscraper has lost a significant part of its walls and floors.
Then the occasional (classic Quake) enemies will come at you. Well, in bunches more often than not... And usually from above.
Ah, and yes, watch your step. Falling into nothing usually causes prompt annihilation - there is still that nasty thing called gravity.
By the way, there's an extra irony: Quake was widely called a corridor shooter, but these are the 'open', wall-less maps. Well, there is an enclosure, of course: that white nothing is a skybox, but it's all tech details.
Anyway, the simplicity here is quite deceiving: details are served with tons of attention, layout is mind-boggling. And then there is that ambient music.
Nullspace is a strong contender in any imaginable Quake mapping competition, or I'm out of my iron-shielded mind.
Some commenters already have said a separate game must be made with aesthetic and approach like this, and that rings true... Except that such a game already exists.
It is called Control (Remedy, 2019).
The visual resemblance (at least to certain parts) is quite striking. But Control is an AAA title, whereas Nullspace had been brought to you basically by a single guy who used the other guys' textures, and who worked, according to himself, 'under a somewhat extreme time crunch'.
Launching, however, may look tricky. Nothing really hard, just requires some tinkering.
First, a hard requirement is using Copper 1.30, a mod/patch/launching utility.
Second, it is strongly recommended to use QuakeSpasm 0.96, or QuakeSpasm Spiked (QSS), or vkQuake, or Ironwail - the advanced source ports.
Of course, you'll need the original assets from the Quake - the contents of id1 folder. Can be taken from the recent Remastered version, fortunately.
The process of installation looks like this.
1. Unzip the contents of your sourceport archive to a folder of your liking.
2. Unzip the contents of Copper archive to the same folder - you'll get a new 'Copper' subfolder inside.
3. Unzip the Nullspace contents into 'Copper' subfolder.
4. Back in the root game folder create a .bat file, name it what you like and add the following line inside:
[ quakespasm-spiked-win64.exe -game copper ]
The actual .exe name depends on what sourceport you use.
5. Enjoy!
They say it is possible to use Nightdive's Quake Remaster to play these maps, but it's not getting along well with Copper, so you'll have to launch the maps by hand. Not exactly desirable, right?
