Recap pages are Spoilers Off by default, so in all these pages all spoilers are unmarked. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned
Five years after travelling through time, the Ranger once again finds himself at the doors of another interdimensional adventure, this time onto more... diverse terrains.The pack was released for Quake's 25th. anniversary alongside the Remastered version, and it has a different structure to other levels, one more akin to Quake itself or the Game Mod Arcane Dimensions.
The levels of the unit are as follows:
- Hub Levels: "The Gateway", "The Machine".
- Dimension of the Machinists: "The Pain Drain", "The Wishing Well", "Sandy's Room".
- Dimension of the Blacksmiths: "Acid Sanctuary", "Fading Embers".
- Dimension of the Stonemasons: "Down the Waste", "Hell or Dark Water".
- Dimension of the Cultists: "Grave Machine", "A Grave Mistake".
- Dimension of the Astrologers: "Nazard Terminal", "Too Deep, Too Greedy".
- Final Level: "Chthon's Vengeance"
This episode shows examples of:
- Already Done for You: Six runes are needed to power The Machine, but one of them was already done by someone who came in before you, dead.
- Art Evolution: The levels in the pack are far more produced than those in the base game and even Dimensions of the Past. The colour palette is also richer than the other episodes, and small details abound.
- Ambiguous Situation: There's a story going on, but most of the details are left unexplained. What led Ranger to begin seeking out the runes? Is he there willingly, or is he trapped within the Machine? What's the backstory of the worlds he explores and is there any significance to the various Quake II references? That's all for you to figure out.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- "Nazard Terminal" opens with a platforming challenge over a large Bottomless Pit, but if you fall into it, the game just teleports you back to the starting cliff instead of killing you, saving you the trouble of having to restart every single time you fail.
- "Too Deep, Too Greedy", the subsequent level, also comes with a teleport mechanic over a dark Bottomless Pit.
- In "Chthon's Vengeance", the titular monster can only be damaged with the Lightning Gun. Thankfully, there's a Cell ammo supply nearby the starting point, and Enforcers (who drop backpacks with two Cell ammo units) are a common foe throughout the level.
- Canon Welding: The episode reuses textures from Quake II, the implication being that this game's arc is being tied onto the Strogg arc, which at the time began life as a separate continuity.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Like Dimensions of the Past, none of the enemies and weapons from Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity are present, only those from the base Quake game.
- Cosmetic Award: The 2021 remaster (in which this episode debuted) offers the following achievements for this episode:
- Finding the entrance to the Secret Level earns you "Sandy's Room".
- Completing the episode earns you "Vengeance Denied".
- Completing the episode in Nightmare mode earns you "Machine Head".
- Descending Ceiling: Several sections of "Hell or Dark Water" feature a crusher that instantly kills anybody who steps onto the floors signalled by the head of dead monsters.
- Eternal Engine: "The Pain Drain" takes place in an industrial facility full of acid pits, gears and boxes.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: "Nazard Terminal" concludes within a prison spaceship, where a crew of Grunts and Enforcers have captured a collection of interdimensional monsters... who have just broken out of their cells.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: The objective of the unit is to retrieve five relics scattered across five worlds.
- Hub Level: Two of them; "The Gateway" contains the portals for difficulty selection, while "The Machine" is the nexus to the other dimensions of the pack.
- Human Sacrifice: Strongly implied to be the fate of a dead Ranger found within a secret area in "Grave Machine", as he is laying flat on a stone slab surrounded by an eerie ritualistic display of candles, with a Pentagram of Protection - the only one in the entire expansion - resting above him.
- Late to the Tragedy:
- Dead bodies of other Rangers are littered throughout the levels, most of whom seem to have been killed while on the same quest that our Ranger is currently undergoing. Most memorable among them is one body lying within "The Machine" itself, who was able to collect the first rune before he died, as it's already present at the start of the game.
- "Too Deep, Too Greedy" includes a venture into some kind of military base that uncovered a portal to the Netherworld, leading to Quake's monsters trashing the place.
- "Nazard Terminal"'s prison spaceship section opens with half of the monsters already broken out.
- Lock and Key Puzzle: As always in Quake, but notably, a few levels cleverly get around the originals' two-locked-door limit by including the idBase Keycards, Medieval Keys and/or Runic Runekeys simultaneously.
- Schizo Tech: The original game's clear separation between science-fiction "idBase" levels and fantasy "Medieval"/"Runic" levels is discarded here, in favour of a wild anything-goes mix of all types in each level.
- Secret Level: "Sandy's Room", accessible from the level "The Pain Drain" by shooting four switches and swimming through an acid pool.
- Sequel Escalation: Made in 2021, this expansion pack takes great advantage of the capacity of modern hardware, with much larger and more complex levels with much more advanced level geometry and design, with more varied environments and much larger enemy groups (it's common for a single level to have 100+ enemies, compared to an average of around 30+ in the original base game). It's also quite lengthy, lasting several hours and being more than twice as long as the previous expansions.
- Shout-Out: The name of the level "Too Deep, Too Greedy" is a paraphrase of a line from The Fellowship of the Ring, "the dwarves dug too greedily and too deep".
- Story Breadcrumbs: There is precious little onscreen text to explain anything, but plenty of environmental storytelling, as the player comes across ruined buildings, burning vehicles, mountains of corpses, and many other clear signs of events outside your control.
- Suspiciously Cracked Wall: Subverted with the Pentagram of Protection secret of "Grave Machine": in the cemetery wing there is a cracked wall, but the entrance to the area it reveals is found in a nearby wall with a texture out of place that must be shot.
- Took a Level in Badass: The Final Boss of the expansion pack is Chthon again, only this time he's more of a proper boss fight rather than the fairly simple Puzzle Boss he originally was.
