Each map is a floor, each floor has a lift, each lift needs a key. You'll work it out I'm sure, just keep going down.
—Text file
Going Down is a 32-level Game Mod for Doom II, created by "mouldy", which you may know better as Cyriak. Similarly to his YouTube videos, Going Down features a lot of creativity, some twisted humor, and extreme attention to details.
The premise is simple. You're tasked with cleaning out the UAC headquarters from monsters, so you climb onto the roof, enter the elevator, and head down the building. Each of the mod's short levels consists of a single floor of the building, where you need simply to find a key and return to the elevator. You visit offices, laboratories, archives, until you finally reach the ground floor. Then you keep going further down. And further down. And further down...
The author has later made another short wad named Overboard, which uses many of the same traits as Going Under: a level formula based around re-powering the vehicle used to enter the level, devilish enemy encounters, a Doomcute architectural style, and being implicitly set in the same continuity.
Not to be confused with Going Under, another game about delving deep beneath an office building.
This mod contains the following tropes:
- Air-Vent Passageway: Level 3, "Crawl Space", is entirely about this: most of your time is spent crawling in (extremely spacious) ventilation ducts between rooms that otherwise seem not to be interconnected at all.
- Bag of Spilling: You lose all of your weapons after entering the titular "Mouth of Madness" at the end of map 20, forcing you to "pistol start" after a monster throws you a pistol while fighting through the monster's insides.
- Continuity Nod:
- While making your way back upstairs during "Stair Crazy", you pass several locations from previous levels.
- If you look beyond a certain wall in level 22, "Constipation Station", you can see a whole vista of a cavernous Hell, with red rock pillars turned into buildings. All levels after this feature similar vistas with the ceiling higher and higher up as you head down on the lift, until you reach the bottom at map 28, "Necropolis". A sub-example of this progression is the titular bridge from level 24, "Bridge of Blood", being visible from the next level, "Forbidden Fruit".
- Fair-Play Villain: At the end of Level 20, "The Mouth Of Madness", Doomguy loses his phone along with all his weapons, and it's found by "one of them monsters". After a friendly chat with Doomguy's mother, said monster decides to throw him a pistol, thus explaining why you have one at the start of the next level (though he clearly expects you to die soon anyway).
- Funny Background Event: The corpses of monsters that you kill in the elevator are consistently there for several levels afterwards, and between maps they gradually rot away until they're barely puddles on the floor.
- Gainax Ending: After clearing Level 29, "Demolition", the final level of the game opens up in an nearby apartment block with the whole adventure revealed to have just been a video game, with a window view showing a new construction project over where the building once stood. After a small puzzle however, demons begin infesting the apartment, and they eventually open the door to the outside corridor... which leads to an elevator going down. The end.
- Hellevator: You take the UAC elevator, and it keeps taking you further and further down to increasingly twisted places. It's rare for a level to not end in an elevator of some variety.
- My Beloved Smother: During intermission segments, Doomguy's mom will call him on the phone to check in (the Secret Levels are even explained as Doomguy briefly heading back up to the roof to get better reception). Doomguy has to remind her that he is killing demons. It is implied that they have had this conversation many times.
- No-Gear Level: Level 21, "Indigestion". You start with a pistol with 50 shots kindly tossed by a monster you didn't kill in the previous level. There are no other weapons or ammunition available, except for a few berserk packs. You have to rely on monster infighting and the digestive systems of the monster whose stomach you're exploringnote to do most of the killing for you.
- Portal to the Past: Level 5, "Time Warp", is based around using a time machine in a lab to go back and forth between the present and the future. This includes puzzles where you lower a platform in the past, then go to the future to use the still-lowered platform to access a newly opened door.
- Punch-Clock Villain: Played for Laughs at the end of Level 13, "Deep Trouble", when you find the elevator, which was destroyed at the beginning of the previous level. Inside is a single imp facing the switch, who has apparently just finished repairing it going by the toolbox by his side. Of course, he's still a demon, so...
- Recycled Soundtrack: The MIDI used for map 4 and 15, "Running From the Jazz Robots," is a SC-55 transcription of the music used in one of Cyriak's own videos, Chimpnology
. - Shout-Out:
- The joke names given to the characters at the end mostly reference 80s kids' show Rainbow.
- The theme music to levels 1 and 29 is titled "Somebody Set Up Us The Bomb".
- Stealth-Based Mission: "Crawl Space" gives you very limited ammo alongside a chainsaw to make your way through the vents. You're encouraged to use said chainsaw to covertly dispatch any Pinkies in the vents themselves under threat of a Spider Mastermind noticing you, and use in-fighting to soften enemies enemies up for when you do make your way into a given room.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: It's implied that the entirety of map 26, "Insanity", is just a psychotic hallucination. It starts with you riding the elevator as usual, then the lights blink and suddenly blood and meat appears on the walls. Then you leave the elevator only to find yourself in a hall of infinite duplicate elevators. And then they all sink into the ground, leaving you in a nightmarish blood-filled landscape. At the end, you experience a brief hallucination and then wake up in the same elevator you've started the level in, whereupon it works normally.
- Trash the Set: Level 29, "Demolition", begins with you outside in front of the building much like at the beginning of the game... but this time with explosive barrels and a plunger set around its base. The Boss Battle that follows is set on the destroyed ruins of the building.
- Womb Level: Level 20, "The Mouth of Madness", ends with you descending into the mouth of some giant creature. Level 21, "Indigestion", is set entirely within its bowels.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: On level 12, "Dead End", you leave the elevator only to find the key right in front of you. The moment you pick it up, the elevator blows up and you must make your way through the sewers on foot.
