Probably give people the crowbar, but hide it in a place that makes sense for a nightmare. Avoids the chance that players don't know how to break the brick wall. Maybe the NPC on the bench could have Gordon's face, and after you interact with him X times, he'll point to where the crowbar is, and a non-functional HEV suit? More symbology is always good.

Originally posted by Vassago Rain:

Probably give people the crowbar, but hide it in a place that makes sense for a nightmare. Avoids the chance that players don't know how to break the brick wall. Maybe the NPC on the bench could have Gordon's face, and after you interact with him X times, he'll point to where the crowbar is, and a non-functional HEV suit? More symbology is always good.

Noted! I will definitely update the map with more stuff when the competition is over. Will make the first puzzles feel a little bit better to play and maybe expand to the upper floor instead of ending the map.

This was a pretty cool map, you have a great vision for surrealist ambience and lighting!

I did get lost twice but the comments under the workshop page helped me solve both of my problems ("1.how do I get the valve? 2.how do I escape the candle room where the eye was?"), my suggestion would be to use the awesome lighting you have to guide the player, the lights made me think that I was supposed to grab various mundane items in certain rooms, it did make me grab the bricks, which incidentally I needed, but at first I mistakenly thought I was supposed to use them to murder the man sitting on the bench so that I could gouge out his eye and use it to open the door (well hey, that could be an alternate ending, if you were to do such a thing, like a "murderer ending"). I also thought for a second that I was supposed to go to the tentacle at the center of the map and have it gouge out *my* eye so that I could progress.

Another "what goes through the player's mind" observation: whenever I entered the rooms, I thought "there must be something I have to do or grab in here", when that wasn't always the case, so that can also be a way to direct the players.

I jumped into the grunting pit and died lol, my Silent Hill instincts tell me that I'm supposed to shove my hand into dark holes and jump into bottomless pits, I suppose the grunting should have been my clue that that would be a bad idea haha.

I absolutely loved the giant headcrab on the wall, there was something really unsettling and freaky about it.

Overall I loved this map, even if I didn't know what to do, I didn't get frustrated and I was willing to look up what I was supposed to do, because the visuals had me *that* interested in seeing all the map had to offer. I guess ultimately I would recommend using your experience in creating striking imagery to plant ideas in the head of the player on how to progress, use lighting and context to suggest things. That did happen when I saw the floating valve in the room with the headcrab, at first I was like "that is an awesome visual", it took me a moment but then I thought "oh wait, I need that valve" so you succeeded in conveying that.