Chasm: The Rift - TimeQuake 

Carmack: "I fear no engine, but that *thing*..." (Chasm footage) Carmack: "...it scares me."

You are absolutely right about "it seems they were learning this engine as they went along", exact thing was happening. It started from small team of just graduated programmers and went along until magically acquired funds to finish and distribute the game.

Civvie having a optimized version of Chasm for years only to later notice it was made by Szymanski is so perfect it feels like fate.

On Chasm's fake 3D, there's a quote from John Carmack that I wish I could find again where he basically said that tech limitations can be resolved with sufficiently clever design. Chasm knows that what you *think* you want is full 3D like Quake, but by playing to its strengths with engaging 2.5D map design and combat while creating a convincing illusion of 3D, your mind just fills in the blanks and makes you think that you're getting everything you wanted. It's almost like good old fashioned stage magic: the only difference between pulling out a card versus making a card "disappear" is to make you look away at just the right moment. It's as much about programming the audience as it is the game.

This game has the feeling of a bunch of young, relatively inexperienced Slavic devs who weren't told certain things were impossible or not worth doing with the tech so just went and did them and overshot needs by a factor of 5, before having to throttle back on others when the deadline loomed.

"This is a great loss for our platoon!" He said with a mysteriously cheerful cadence.

This feels like the kind of insane artistic fuckery that come from pure spite at being denied access to the resources other aritsts take for granted. Its like the sculptor who was given shit marble to work with and busted his ass to produce crazy organic looking statues.

17:46 - the floor is actually meant to explode and drench everything in lava. You see several lava pieces, but the floor remains intact. The "floor" is actually an animated 3D object that's not working properly. That's why you keep dying unless you enter the portal. Edit: Also, I know you don't really cover mods, but we actually "ported" this game to ZDoom. We call it ZRift, and I took it upon myself to recreate all the maps in the Doom editor... The plan was to expand upon the game with new maps and enemies, but the project kind of stopped.

Ok, what the developers did to get a 2.5D game to look this good is some kind of dark arcane magic. That is seriously impressive.

This is such a mishmash of other game's DNA that I constantly feel like I recognize it even though I've never heard of Chasm before.

I love the line "Try to pay maximum attention" It's such an obviously non-human thing to say but it's still fluent enough english for the voice actor to pass it off as a coherent sentence

I see lots of comments from people who don't understand how Chasm's engine works, so here's a small description: - Floor and ceiling textures are grid based. Walls however, can be placed wherever you want and at any angle. - Just like in Wolfenstein 3D, there's no height variation, although you can fake small stairs or ceilings using 3D models. - Lighting works just like in Quake; you place a point light, set the radius and the brightness, and then the engine renders it and draws the shadows. This is very cool because some of these light sources can be destroyed (if you shoot a lamp), activated (with a switch, or when entering a room) or set to spin in circles, like the one at 10:34.

That engine is absolutely insane. So this was Timesplitters before Timesplitters was a thing? This game must really be from the future.

What I love the most about Civvie's videos is how he talks about the technical side of every game he plays. Learning about the technical build of this game's maps is infinitely interesting to me.

This game uses no skeletob-animations, only good old vertex animations. Chasm: the Rift animations looks better than Quake animations because it uses more bits to store vertex positions (16 bits per component instead of 8 in Quake).

If anyone's interested, the game is now officially available on both GOG and Steam, 7 months after this review's release.

i have a theory about shotguns in slavic games. in the west, the shotgun has a certain image. its a rebel's weapon. the germans tried to declare their use by the USA a warcrime. it's a defender's weapon used to secure stagecoaches. a shotgun's blast is like a shout of defiance. in russia, when you get a firearms license, at first you may only purchase shotguns. they are a poor hunter's weapon. they kill birds and small game. a young child might be taught basic firearms skills and safety with a shotgun. theyre weapons barely fit for war, and only the desperate would take one over say, a rifle. so in western games theyre made punchy and powerful. and in slavic games, theyre kinda meh.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact enemies will change their attacks once you blow limbs off. Like the Jokers will bite you once they lose both arms.

The way he said "This is a great loss for our platoon" tells me he only read this line once, and it was during recording, and even though he clearly read the sentence wrong because his tone of voice is happy sounding, they still used it. This is why Civvie cannot overuse the word "Jank." Because the jank just keeps janking. Ain't no party like a Slav Jank party because a Slav Jank party only stops when the game freezes.

The more I learned about how this game worked, the less I saw the devs as game designers and more as mad scientists hunched over a computer, watching their creation slowly come to life, and ever so subtly muttering “It’s hideous. It’s perfect.”

This game is like one of those "Doom" mods that require the absolute latest version of GZDoom because of all the fancy 3D models and effects and such only available in the modern Doom sourceports. Except it was made two decades before that sort of thing was possible. Are we 100% sure the developers didn't have a time machine?

Civ: "What kind of game demands this level of devotion?" Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines: *LAUGHING IN THE DISTANCE*

This was the first game I ever saw in stores and asked my Mom for. I was 6. She said no. That figure on the cover, I saw him in my dreams for years and wondered what it meant. That image formed the foundation of my young psyche, but remained a mystery for so long. Now I know the truth and can die peacefully. Thank you Civvie

I had that game and loved it. When everyone was playing Quake, my incredibly outdated Pentium Overdrive (basically an upgraded 486) was playing this baby boy. Quake ran at 5, maybe 8 FPS. Chasm was smoother, probably 25 to 30 FPS. So this was my Quake for years.

I'm always tickled when I see another person acknowledge Chasm's existence. It's like, yeah, I wasn't dreaming, that game was real.

Getting Doom engine, Build engine, and Quake engine vibes all at the same time. What a weird, magical cocktail. Amazing stuff.

What I love about Civvie's reviews is that they include history and development history/facts that I (as a pleb) would not know about, esp at first glance. Like him saying, "This game was made back in time, but feels like a current day boomer shooter rendition that was made today" or w/e (it's a rough quote bear with me). As the video goes on it continues to blow my mind, like it blew his and how he shared those thoughts on "HOW TF DID THEY DO THIS?". etc

Oh God… Cryostatis… that game that has lived in my mind for nearly a decade… Frozen hell in a ship hull, a mix of The Thing, Metro and Ghost Ship… but wholly it’s own thing..

"That's like a skinwalker sentence" oh god what have you done. You've added a new phrase to my lexicon

speaking from a 3d modeling perspective, those npc models are genuinely amazingly well done. especially the faces, they look almost like they're using a 2.5d technique or something, completely different than a normal low-poly execution. like, they look almost as though they are animated pixel art, not pre-baked vertex animations

I've always thought Civvie put care into his videos. But I have a new level of respect after turning on the captions. It's so detailed, even noting music, sound effects, and other audio mutation. This guy goes above and beyond

"it's like english in the uncanny valley" what a marvelous quote

I especially like how the devs travelled to the future to hire Sam Hyde as the scientist guy... impressive attention to detail and commitment to the gimmick there

What is the TimeQuake, CV-11?

When you mentioned it being about time travel and having Egypt in it, I kept thinking "what is this, Serious Sam? Are Croteam members of the Chasm Cult too?" Then I got thinking. Game made by slavs featuring teleporting monsters, time travel, Egypt, Medieval Europe, a weird blend of enemies, bosses that are glorified puzzles and engines that managed to get really impressive feats onto low to mid end hardware through the power of proprietary jank. Look at all the time things we can time discover once our time eyes have been time opened

20:06 "Best to take cover and fire at his saw hand to eliminate his ranged attack." So this game had enemy weak spots that, when damaged, disables certain attacks and thus makes that enemy safer to engage. Y'know, like in Doom Eternal. *This game beat Eternal to the punch by 23 years.*

I really, really appreciate how this game made brand-new enemies for all of its chapters. I always like it when games go the extra mile for no reason other than trying to keep the player entertained.

I maintain that Chasm makes a perfect prequel to Quake, because it ends with you jumping through a portal to netherrealms unknown...

This game deserves a proper remastered version. Nightdive Studios can you hear me?

Chasm The Rift was marketed as Quake alternative which can be played on 486 PCs. There were several late 486 based chips overclocked to hell, with pretty good performance in tasks architecture was designed for, but lacking new instruction sets, changes and upgrades introduced in Pentium, they were still not up to scratch when it came to running Quake. Chasm engine is built exactly around these limitations to make it run on those later day 486 chipset systems. Funnily enough, when I've played it for the first time, I was really annoyed that it isn't fully 3D. Years have passed an I had a blast with Project Warlock, which is even less 3D in design, lol.

The enemy name "Gross" is german for "big" or "tall". And the enemy named "Faust" is german for "Fist".

That impressive spinning light is probably made by animating the textures on the walls, which is a ridiculously neat effect for a game that doesn't have modern dynamic lighting. Shows just how much effort went into the game to make the engine seem like more than it actually is.

There's something about Strickland's voice actor I am in absolute love with. I can't pin it down exactly, but it sounds like the voice actor was told, "Make him sound like a complete comic stereotype of a nerd" and the actor went, "Sure thing," and instead went 100% in with trying to make him sound genuine and believably nerdy instead

I was always impressed by Chasm. Yes, even at the time I recognised that the levels all had that flat plane that so many Wolfenstein-esque Doom clones did, but the game was inventive in finding cool ways around that (unlike, say, any game by Capstone).

What Civvie usually forgets to mention, when it comes to "slav jank" games, is that they were made on 10.000th of a budget that most western developers have at their disposal and in most cases start as passion projects, that the teams are usually localized and extremely small in numbers, having additional difficulty of finding a decent publisher who will put the game on store shelves worldwide. So It all boils down to recognizing when a genuine effort has been made and for me, who played and finished Chasm three years ago for the first time, it was quite an enjoyable and technically impressive game that got undeservingly pushed to the side cause it carried a certain "stigma". A stigma of being a Quake clone. Oh, and it came from *insert slavic country here*, lets not forget that.

Loved Chasm: The Rift back in the day. Bought the big box back in 97'. It still blows my mind how well the game ran on a 486. The software rendered graphics where so good for the time and had a blast playing through it!

Fun fact: Chasm, The Rift is on Switch, I brought it recently because of this video and honestly? It's actually really fucking good

I remember playing the demo of Chasm before playing Quake. The visual leap from Doom was huuuge, specially in that first level, seeing the raindrops and everything.

The machine spirit blessed them when they were making this engine. Knowledge since lost... maybe for the better

4:35 Civvie's tangent about the "Timestrikers" made me think about him making a video about the Timesplitters franchise, that'd be cool.

You want to know how cult this is? Some chads spent an insane amount of time reverse engineering the game, assets and all. THEN remade the entire game using a pixel perfect software render as well as a gl renderer. Apparently it was a custom engine originally. Would of so played it back in the game if I had it.

10:50 Nucular never dies.

3:42 This model looks ridiculously fucking good, almost reminds me a bit of illustrated art.

The way that engine combines 2.5D with real 3D models is so ingenuos that it almost feel like what modern retro games do when they're trying to do some black magic with a source port of the Doom engine, and I really dig the resulting aesthetic. Also as someone who speaks English as a second language I love when someone pulls off that slightly odd but perfectly understandable text that only a person that sees English as a puzzle can produce.

I remember back in 1999, going to a computer show in town with my dad and seeing this game for $5, so my dad bought it for me had I played the living hell out of it. I remember thinking it was a pretty cool quake inspired game and really being into the dismemberment mechanics

I remember playing this game as a kid, and after a while realizing it *felt* more 3D than Quake. Its hard to say exactly why, probably a hundred audiovisual details.

It's amazing how the IT guy's voice sounds like a perfect mix of the HL1 scientist and Alex Jacobson from Deus Ex.

"I'm gonna finish that game some day." Some day:

"New Retro Throwback Made in the Past" is an accurate way to describe everything Slavic

Honestly this game feels familiar even though I have never seen it before, this is like that missing evolutionary link between then and now, and the game itself looks more like a new retro shooter than actuall new retro shooters, the game really had something going with the time travel narrative, since it itself looks like it was made some 25 years after it's release

I was waiting this video since years. The first time i played Chasm was in 1997 in a demo cd magazine. I had a Pentium 90Mhz...and i was litterally astonished by its graphic. I played Quake after some months but it didn't impress me as much Chasm did also because it was lot more demanding in hardware requirements and enviroments didn't change a lot while Chasm had four distinctive levels. It's an historical piece in fps genre. Then the graphic it's the perfect mix of bitmap artwork and low poligons that it's so common these days in the retro-style videogames. It litterally seems a modern indie fps

10:27 Ironically, the Varginha Incident actually is true 3D.

I've always liked Chasm. The music, environmental sounds, and enemy sounds give it a lot of atmosphere. It has really good low poly models that further add to that sense of place. The weapon firing and pickup sounds are really crunchy, distinctive, and that audio mixed with the dismemberment mechanic it makes the combat feel satisfying and fun. Due to the heavy use of static meshes you just don't even notice the levels are actually Wolf3D type mazes. More importantly the levels are small; they never get as sprawling as the maps in Wolf3D or other games with similar flat maze maps. This means that rooms tend to look different; there's not enough space to recycle meshes or textures too often. Chasm has a cult following because of its good aesthetic qualities that make it atmospheric and fun to play, plus the ingenious tech trickery further adds to the atmosphere while making it more playable than virtually any other flat maze type game from that era (or even some modern with levels like this). Its a modest product that punches above its weight.

22:33 Damn. I did not expect that reference. Civvie goes deep.

This game's limb dismemberment was always one of my favourite things about it, really helped make the combat feel much more satisfying, even more-so than Quake Imo. I really wish more shooters nowadays had it

This game's minigun looks exactly like Unreal's stinger, but this is older. Epic has some 'splaining to do.

It's amazing how all it took me to find this game was a civvie video. I've been looking for it literally for years, played it when I was like 7 or 8 since then I've had it in mind trying to find it.

12:51 What's great about this bit in the manual is that it's basically a multi-level bilingual historical reference dad joke. The name "Faust" is, probably aside from the tale of demonic deals gone wrong, most commonly associated with the Panzerfaust recoilless gun, hence the rocket launcher. But it also means "fist" in German. So yeah, "Fist" packs a punch.

I like to imagine that whenever there are those dialogue-kind of cutscene things, that the guy youre talking to is just holding both of your hands and gets really close to you

I played this back in the day and always thought it weird how you couldn't look completely up or down. The 2D/3D thing makes so much sense now.

Remember the time, when I stayed at school after hours to have a chance to play this thing on the computer lab's 486 IBM PC. Spend shit-ton of time to figure out how to beat the first boss, "Батька" ("Daddy" in the original Russian version of the game) though. Even in the post-Soviet countries, this thing was not well known. Everybody thought that this is a Quake clone or smth

I love how HROT fully expands on the feel of Chasm: The Rift. It is equally detailed all the way through.

Bonifaciy is an actual name. it's not so bad, the "i"s are both pronounced as if in a closed syllable, like in "kiss", and that "c" really should have been a "tc", but that's about it.

Cryostasis is great and way ahead of its time ! Having said that it had lots of technical issues although i was lucky and did not experience almost any.

As a kid I saved my pennies enough to buy the bundle pack of Quake with both expansions that Electronics Boutique had shrink wrapped together. Chasm was on the shelf next to it and I just happened to have almost enough money for it too. Box art got me, as good box art should, so I conned my mom into making up the difference, and I'm glad I did. I definitely figured out something was weird about this game's construction. At the time, compared to Quake giving me my first taste of true 3D shooters, I thought Chasm was just a crappy 3D engine, but now that Civvie has educated me a bit, apparently it's actually the final boss of 2.5D. Good to know other people remember this game fondly. Even though I was initially disappointed with the rather flat maps, I still enjoyed it and it left a fairly deep impression in my memory.

“While you were away on your mission, our base had been under attack 😮 We were able to withstand the attack but with great difficulty 😃 Unfortunately, there were casualties 😃 We lost the Commander 😔 This is a great loss for our platoon 😃 However, me must go on 😤” Wtf is the voice acting on this guy

We really don't get quality Zardoz references anymore do we, but now, now we've got one

My friends used to laugh at me for enjoying Chasm. When I mention it today... they still laugh at me. And I still enjoy it.

27:03 ironic as it is, this might be a much bigger pain to run Cryostasis properly on any modern system than it is to run any of those 90s retro-games. Although the game itself sure deserves taking a look at.

I have literally spent all of yesterday losing my mind about the power of 2.5d shooters and here you are uploading the most sorcerous example. This is amazing.

That Zardoz audio clip came out of nowhere to give me the biggest giggle fit of my month so far. God, that movie is strange.

My first thought when I saw this on my subscription feed was: "That son of a beehive finally did it...". I´ve been waiting for this for sometime now. Great work as always Civvie! I´m hoping you´ll do Powerslave: Exhume in the near future. Cheers!

Shit man, Doom might not have had rooms on top of rooms, but it had variable floor height, and walls angled in all sorts of ways. The way Chasm seems to happen all on the same floor and walls almost always in 90 degrees angles, it's basically more like Wolf3D on steroids that are also on steroids.

"When they say destroy the sphinx they really mean the statue it burst out of" Dude the sphynx is a statute, not a strange dog-like mutant that likes to hide in cat-man statutes.

An alien species called the time strikers going through time to end humanity. I guess i now know where TimeSplitters got its premise idea.

14:22 whoa, crazy Gordon Freeman cameo'd in Chasm a year before Half-Life

Chasm: The Rift was a great game for its day. Had a blast running this on a Pentium in a beige non-descript box.

Finally! I've been waiting for years for you to tackle this game. Great video as usual.

Civvie taking the phrase "duck for cover" literally reminds me of that guy who ruined Goldeneye 64 speedrunning by misunderstanding the phrase "put your nose down to the grindstone."

Those 3d character models are great. The attempts to recreate that effect in real 3d engines have never quite nailed it.

"this is a great loss for our platoon" -said in the exact same cadence as the marketing lady trying to convince you to go to the optional employee picnic.

"Like i consider myself a winner but I'm a fat nerd who was just impressed by a spinning light in a quarter-century-old video game." - The reason why this is one my my favourite YT channels

"You thought it was going to be a king of the hill joke" You got me there.

Me: I'm having a bad day... *Civvie relases a video* Me: I have some joy

Man, thanks for bringing back so many memories. All I remembered about this from back in the day was that it sort of looked like Quake run through the Build engine, you could blow heads off and you couldn't crouch.

Remembering playing the demo at the time, then the full game a year or two later... Such a good surprise ! Some details never seen, cool animations, enemies and weapons, all that we want in a nutshell. Oh, I when I saw the dismemberments... (I'm remembering now have changed the damage parameter in the ini file to be a little *powerful* ... result : huge dismemberment with fumes, so fun)

I was checking out old Ross' and Civvie's videos longing for some new content, and 12 hours later you upload. Thanks for your work, Civvie!

Wow a Zardoz reference? Deep cut, Civvie! You win all of the internets.

I just found your videos and I have say, bravo good sir. Great content thank you for these man brought back my child hood!

I realised at exactly the same point you did in the video and had exactly the same reaction. The space odyssey mind warp effect captured it perfectly. What a hilarious twist.