Bitter Dream
By LVENdead - 10 Maps
Format: MBF21
[Download]
Started: October 3rd 2026
Finished: October 4th 2026
Status: Completed
After so thoroughly enjoying LVENdead's other major release, Forlorn, I was really excited to take a look at Bitter Dream. LVENdead's dual skill at intricate detailing and original midi composition is what makes him so unique as a mapper, and Bitter Dream is a great showcase of both of those skills, but it also has it's own set of issues that drag down the experience a bit. The opening trio of maps is quite solid, and Map 3 "Voidhome" makes for a fun techbase adventure to close out the first episode, but having all your health and ammo locked in specific supply rooms, while very cool thematically, does make it much easier than normal to run completely out of ammo. Unfortunately beyond this point I have more complaints than praise for this wad. Bitter Dream is noticeably harder than Forlorn was, especially in the middle third, and not always in a good way. This ethereal realm you spend a lot of time in has large chunks (later on literally ALL of it) lit by a bright red sky. Standing under it slowly kills you without a radsuit on. Unlike regular damaging floor this takes up a comparatively large amount of space in many of these maps, and it's easy to miss which parts of the map will just kill you for existing there while you're in the middle of a big firefight. In some cases this can even just mean forced damage because there's nowhere to hide from the death sky and you're not given a radsuit to safely survive it. Bad damaging floor usage is already something I really dislike, but how it's handled here ends up feeling even worse. The death sky does get less usage in the final third, but by this point, Bitter Dream has progressed pretty firmly to slaughter territory, which will alienate anyone looking for a more normal set of maps, and the final map is just one big dumb flat circle that throws in enemies from all directions with very little cover. Part of my frustrations might have come from the weird difficulty renaming, with the Hurt Me Plenty slot now being "Hard" when it usually Doom's normal difficulty, with Bitter Dream's "Normal" being in the HNTR slot instead. I always play wads on HMP, but maybe in this case going with this wads official difficulty names would've been a better idea? It's a shame I didn't really like Bitter Dream in terms of gameplay, because visually it's an absolute treat, and the original midis are pretty fantastic too, but so it goes.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐
Favorite Map - Map 3: "Voidhome"
Least Favorite Map - Map 5: "The Pariah"