Video Game / Chasm: The Rift

Lionmen and hoodmen and rocket launchers and zombies, oh my.

Before they got to let us Hunt Dinosaurs, peel off fur and skin out of half-animal hybrids or explore frozen ships with an ability to alter the past, the Ukraine-based Action Forms debuted into the PC gaming industry in 1997 with Chasm: The Rift, a relatively little-known first-person shooter that is more than influenced by the likes of Quake, made in their own in-house engine. The game pits the player in the shoes of a marine trying to fend off the Timestrikers, mutants who invade the earth at few dozen time periods at once, providing an excuse to have levels based on four different time periods. The game is also an early case of a shooter with a dismemberment system which allowed the player to blast off an enemy's limbs and in some cases even the head.

In September 2022 an Updated Re Release of Chasm: The Rift was announced, coinciding with the game's 25th anniversary, retaining the game's original graphics, but with modern 3D hardware acceleration allowing for modern resolutions up to 4K, as well as some modern effects such as dynamic lighting and shadows. The remaster was released on October 10th, 2022 on Steam and Gog.com, with a demo was made available on September 22nd, 2022. The remaster was published by SNEG and made by General Arcade, known for remasters of games like Shadow Warrior, Metal Wolf Chaos, and Pathologic.

Not to be confused with the 2018 side-scrolling Metroidvania simply named Chasm, nor with the Doom II level named The Chasm.

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This game provides examples of:

• Anachronism Stew: Considering the game's premise it was inevitable.
• An Arm and a Leg: An early example of a shooter featuring a dismemberment system. Some enemy types can be rendered defenseless this way by taking off their weapon arms.
• Attract Mode: Much like in first two Quake games, Chasm plays back a demo upon launch.
• Bat Out of Hell: The boss of the medieval levels has this sort of look.
• BFG: It has one in the form of the Mega Destroyer, a grenade launcher-like weapon that evaporizes non-boss enemies in a flash with a single direct hit. The splash damage is only average to above-average, though, so it's more for quickly deleting a single enemy rather than for clearing out an entire room with one shot.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Averted; when you have armor, your armor takes the full amount of damage from an attack, but your health still takes some additional damage equal to about 1/4rd of the attack's damage. This is different from Doom or Quake where a portion of the total damage was applied to armor and the rest to health. It also means armor doesn't double your durability, but does raise it somewhat (by about 75% at full health and armor).
• Boom, Headshot!: Decapitation is possible through the game's dismemberment system. This is at least necessary to take down the zombies (although explosives would suffice too).
• Boring, but Practical: The super shotgun would serve you well for most of the game, helps that the ammo for it is plentiful.
• Brown Note: The zombies can harm you from afar by yelling at you.
• Continuing is Painful: Similar to most other First-Person Shooter games of the time period, dying in a level would reset you back to the beginning of the level, except you lose all your weapons, ammo, and armor and have to make do with your starting weapon. Hope you've got a save game you can load from.
• Cool Versus Awesome: You're a space marine blasting off vikings, zombies, executioners and others while traveling through variety of time periods.
• Creepy Cemetery: One of the medieval levels has one, full of zombies.
• Dark Fantasy: The medieval levels go for this sort of vibe.
• Deadly Disc: The Bladegun weapon shoots out saw disks and is among one of the more reliable weapons to put the game's dismemberment system into play.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: How the first boss is dealt with. Another one appears in one of the final levels, it'll suck in passing enemies and you if you're not careful.
• Decapitated Army: Defied. Your commander is offed very early into the story by the Timestrikers' assault but that doesn't deter your organization's progress a single bit.
• Dem Bones: The medieval levels would pit you against skeleton warriors.
• Drone of Dread: A ghastly one can be heard at the medieval cemetery.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The human base gets under attack off-screen in middle of the last level of the present-day episode, with your commander ending up being among the casualties.
• Exact Words: When confronting the second boss, the game tells you to "Destroy the Sphinx completely!". The boss monster that bursts out of the Sphinx isn't the Sphinx. You need to obliterate the remains of the Sphinx to defeat the boss.
• Excuse Plot: The story of the game goes like this: Time-travelling aliens from the future attacked us. Kill them all and save mankind. Howgh.
• The Executioner: The Axe-wielding "Punishers" show up as enemies in egyptian and medieval levels.
• Exploding Barrels: Present and accounted for in present-day levels.
• Expy: More like a blatant copy of Quake II's Super Shotgun.
  • The Final Boss loosely resembles Shub Niggurath.
• Full-Boar Action: Werehogs show up as enemies in the medieval levels.
• Game Mod:
  • Panzerchasm is an in-development (and since discontinued) source port of Chasm, allowing it to be run on modern systems with modern hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in years and in its current state is more of a proof-of-concept, with various inaccuracies such as incorrect enemy A.I. behavior (i.e. simplified movement on most enemies, zombies are vulnerable to normal damage, enemies dismember more easily and don't get stunlocked, etc), missing music and bullet impact decals, and possibly scripting bugs that potentially prevent it from being completable (i.e. the first boss drops their key too close to the killwall fan, many wall traps close faster than they should which forces you to take heavy damage (a big problem in the 3rd episode), a shootable button on Level 15 is missing making progress impossible without noclip, etc).
  • Chasm Portable is a compilation of modifications to the original Chasm to get it to run as smoothly as possible on modern systems via Dosbox. It's most notable for being put together by David Szymanski, the creator of DUSK.
  • In 2021, a new fan-made campaign consisting of 4 maps, titled Cursed Land, was released, playable on either the original Chasm or Panzerchasm.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Your basic enemy in the first present-day episode consists of troopers wearing these, in rifle, rocket launcher and jetpack wearing varieties.
• Gatling Good: The vulcan cannon sports this sort of design.
• Green and Mean: Most of the mutated enemies have greenish skin.
• Guide Dang It!: The hint on how you should negotiate with the first boss^note hide for a while appears 2 seconds before you're treated to a face-full of him. Too short of a time for you to actually get out of his sight before he spots you. Once he does, there's no way of avoiding him in the cramped arena to survive long enough for the escape path to open. Save Scumming is literally mandatory here since even after getting the hint it'll take you several failed attempts to figure out where can you hide safely.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Lionmen that show up in the Egyptian levels. The bonus levels introduce wolfmen of a similar nature, though their stocky build and tusk-like fangs make them look more like pigmen than wolfmen (in fact they appear to be orcs wearing wolf pelts on their heads).
• Hitbox Dissonance: The hitboxes on everything are a lot fatter than they should be. Projectile weapons such as the sawblade launcher or crossbow will often get caught on corners instead of passing through (this can really screw you if a grenade detonates in your face when you're trying to fire it around a corner), and if an enemy pins you against a wall you'll likely be immobilized even though it looks like you should be able to slide around them. Panzerchasm has more standard hitboxes so these problems don't crop up. The 2022 remaster, on the other hand, retains the fat hitboxes.
• Horny Vikings: These show up as an enemy in the medieval levels.
• Invisibility Cloak: Such powerup is present. It does not nullify your sound and the enemies can still sense you if you'd get too close.
• Kaizo Trap: After the second boss dies, the ceiling starts to collapse, which will instantly kill you if you don't quickly run immediately for the level exit. Complicating things is a Lionman who will run into the escape corridor and block it, getting you killed, unless you stunlock him with gunfire as soon as you see him and run past him.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Landmines are available as a weapon.
• Level Editor: The game came with a level editor for making custom levels. The 2022 remaster includes this level editor, however it only works for the DOS version of the game (included with the remaster) since the remaster version is based on entirely new code.
• Lizard Folk: The Timestriker aliens you finally face in episode 4 seem to be halfway between lizard and insect.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: Few levels have different objectives but this usual fare is still present.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Wouldn't be a late 90s first person shooter without them.
• Minimalist Cast: The game is barely more crowded than the usual id Software fare of the time, adding the commander (who doesn't last for long) and his assistant briefing the marine in between levels to the pool of the marine himself and the monsters he fights.
• Misidentified Weapons: The so-called "grenader" works essentially as a Rocket Launcher, as its projectiles are not affected by gravity. The Mega Destroyer's projectiles, however, do arc with gravity, showing the engine was capable of doing so.
• Monster Clown: Well, sawblade-wielding Monster Jesters, showing up in the medieval levels (and the game's boxart).
• Nintendo Hard: The first episode is of fairly standard difficulty, but the difficulty ramps up pretty steeply around the time you reach the 3rd episode. This is also around the time the game starts frequently throwing dirty tricks at you, such as instant death traps and Teleporting Keycard Squad.
• Our Orcs Are Different: The 2 new enemies and new boss Bonifaciy added in the expansion pack levels appear to be orcs, based on their greenish skin, orc-like features, and tusks.
• Puzzle Boss: All of them require unorthodox methods of dispatching. The first boss has to be lured onto a ventilation fan and the third boss is weakened by the light coming from the sky.
• Random Number God: Like many early First-Person Shooters like Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, enemy projectile damage is semi-random, with the randomness increasingly weighed against you on the higher difficulty levels. Melee damage, however, is fixed, and doesn't change with difficulty.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: The starting rifle which has infinite ammo.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zombies can't be killed by normal damage, and you need to either decapitate them or destroy their bodies with explosives. Averted with the skeleton warriors in the medieval levels; they can survive being decapitated and will continue fighting as though nothing had happened.
• Save Scumming: Saving at any time is possible.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Similar to Quake, the game has monster infighting, with enemies attacking each other if they accidentally damage each other. Different enemy types will also fight to the death once the player is dead.
• Sentry Gun: These show up as enemies in the first episode.
• Shaped Like Itself: The game's title, considering a Chasm is a Rift.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The super shotgun fits this bill, though due to the game's tight, claustrophobic environments, you'll almost never engage enemies outside the shotgun's effective range.
• Shot-for-Shot Remake: The 2022 re-release is in fact a complete rebuild of the game reverse-engineered from the ground up, as the game's original source code was lost. It is, however, extremely faithful to the original game, with some quality-of-life improvements such as modern 3D acceleration, and some modern graphical effects such as dynamic lighting and shadows, and some new features such as achievements, the ability to bind weapons to individual hotkeys besides the number keys, and a stat tracker to show how many secrets you've found.
• Smash Mook: Most large humanoid enemies have some form of ranged attack as well as their primary melee (Gross, the ogre, can throw stones, the Executioner can throw his axe, etc), but the Lionmen and Vikings are limited to charging you and clobbering you with their maces and axes.
• Standard FPS Guns: The game's roster of weapons features a double-barreled pump-action shotgun, a chaingun-like weapon, a rapid bladed projectile weapon, an energy crossbow, a rocket propelled grenade launcher, land mines and a room-cleaning grenade launched dubbed the Mega Destroyer. Melee weapons are absent, and a low-powered rifle is present in place of an expected pistol.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: Perhaps one of the harshest examples ever. From Level 9 onward one nasty trick the game likes to play is to teleport a group of enemies right on top of you after you flip a switch or pick up a keycard. Their fat hitboxes prevent you from moving while they maul you to death; the only escape is to have enough armor to survive while you equip a high hitstun weapon like the minigun or crossbow and blast your way out. Thankfully this is mostly limited to the medieval levels, and only happens once or twice in the final set of levels from Level 13 onward.
• Time Travel: The theme of the game. You start up at industralized military base in present day, then pop up in Ancient Egypt, going through the medieval times until finally ending in the future in the Timestrikers' turf.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The final boss of the bonus levels, the High Priest Bonifaciy, can only be defeated by reflecting his attack back at him with the reflector powerup. The reflector powerup runs out after a short period of time and is found a good distance away from the boss lair. If it runs out before you can make your way back to the boss the level becomes unwinnable; hope you have a save file from before you picked it up.
• A Winner Is You: Beating the final boss lends you a text crawl.
• Weapons Kitchen Sink: The weapons definitely don't come from the same era. The weirdest one is probably the energetic(?) crossbow.
• Womb Level: A small section of a level, but the final boss is defeated by getting inside of it and destroying it's heart.