Recap pages are Spoilers Off by default, so in all these pages all spoilers are unmarked. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned
In the fourth episode of
Quake, the
Ranger enters the Elder World in order to retrieve the fourth and final rune, the Rune of Elder Magic.
The episode is composed of seven levels, plus a
Secret Level: "The Sewage System", "The Tower of Despair", "The Elder God Shrine", "The Palace of Hate", "Hell's Atrium", "The Pain Maze" and "Azure Agony".
The episode provides examples of:
- Brutal Bonus Level: "E4M8: The Nameless City" is extremely difficult, has nearly 95 monsters, and will probably eat up all of your ammo by the time you finish them.
- Cosmetic Award: The 2021 remaster offers the following achievements for this episode:
- Finding the entrance to the Secret Level earns you "Into Sandy's City".
- Completing "E4M6: The Pain Maze" on Nightmare difficulty without taking damage earns you "The Painless Maze".
- Completing the episode earns you "The Last Unexplored Path".
- Dungeon Bypass:
- Huge sections of multiple levels in Episode 4 can be bypassed in some way or another. Most of those techniques the developers noticed were kept, but a warning message comes up in case the player didn't realize.
- Dungeon bypassing is actually how you get access to Episode 4's secret level: instead of using the Silver Key to lower the bridge that leads to the exit archway, jump through the tiny columns that are where the bridge would be put over and head to the archway on the left... which requires a Silver Key to open.
- Healing Spring: There's a very convenient one in "E4M4: The Palace of Hate", one of the hardest levels.
- Meaningful Name: "Azure Agony" is the final level of the final episode, and with the exception of a small hall, its architecture is nothing but azure walls and the occasional window, the most common enemy is the blue Spawn and there is only one Key to collect - the Silver Key (which has a somewhat blue-ish look).
- Overshadowed by Awesome: Courtesy of this being meant to be the most difficult of the four base game's episodes, monster demographics are different: Ogres and Knights, the most common castle enemies in the earlier episodes, are completely replaced in that role by Fiends and Death Knights, respectively, in the second half of the episode.
- Secret Level: "E4M8: The Nameless City".
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Episode 4 has Mega health packs, Red Armor, Pentagrams of Protection and several Quad Damage powerups in plain sight, instead of hidden in secret areas like in the previous episode. There is, of course, a good reason to use them.
