The Surprise [UPDATED]

[JawJoe]

Gave it a quick playthrough

Spoiler below!

This map is kind of a mess. There's really no clear direction of where to go, I just kept wandering aimlessly until things happened, there isn't a plot or reason for anything...it's just confusing. That one upside-down room was a gigantic mess of textures and a lack of anything resembling structure, which may or may not have been the goal, but it comes across as somewhat lazy in the way it was executed. It's cool that you used the corpse face texture as a floor, but it would have been better had you tried to structure the room better. Near the end when you've completely explored that dark hallway and were teleported to the room you couldn't access before, there is absolutely nothing that tells you that those two rooms are completely pointless, which is confusing. I sat in there for about 5-7 minutes looking for a key to the locked door, trying to activate an event or something to progress when I apparently should have gone back to the first room from before. Why even have that area unlocked if there was nothing in there but some potato sacks and a locked door? It's unnecessary. The actual surprise...well, can't say I wasn't surprised to see ponies, I definitely didn't expect that. Got nothing against the use of ponies in joke stories, but the surprise wasn't really worth the effort to play through it. If you make a joke story, you should definitely step up the gameplay a little more. Oh, also, I thought the game broke because it wouldn't end. I had to manually quit the map. If it's a bug you should fix that; if it's intentional, you should definitely fix that.

Honestly, I wasn't too fond of it, but thats because of the fact that a joke map should be somewhat entertaining and funny at times, which this was sadly lacking. I'd say work on trying to making your maps more entertaining, maybe add something funny here and there, and also work on your layout and design.
Nice try

I definitely appreciate such an honest review! I can't say I can refute anything you said about the map, it's all true. Looking back, I can see it being one big mess - partly because I wanted to cram everything into a single map, and partly because I learned to use the different editors as I was creating it. I was effectively making things up as I went along. I realise that this made the map the mess it is, but making a coherent, real, story-driven mini-CS wasn't my intention to begin with - learning how to do things so I can create good ones later was.
I can see why people don't like that. I wouldn't either.

About one room:

Spoiler below!

The room you get teleported into when you get to the end of the dark hallway was meant (and obviously failed) to be a sort of mind-screw event. As if this hallway and the dark one were somehow the same. The empty room with potato sacks was meant to represent the zombie event-room, while the upside-down painting was meant to symbolise the "screwed-up" room (as if the player had "imagined" them to be what you saw originally). I'm still confident that the idea was good, but the execution was.. terrible, at best, I can see.

That's about all I can say. Thanks for the feedback, it is much appreciated.