The Shores of Hell

The Shores of Hell is the second episode in Doom. All maps in this episode are credited to Sandy Petersen, though many of them were first started by Tom Hall. The episode is set on Deimos, which is being overrun and infested by the demonic forces. To show this, its levels generally resemble UAC facilities that have been partially altered by the demonic invaders. The sky used for the background consists of mountains against red clouds.

Story
After defeating the barons that were protecting the main gateway on Phobos and gaining access to the anomaly, the Doom marine finds himself caught in an ambush. After noting the stench of rotten meat, he realizes that his surroundings seem to resemble the lost Deimos moon base which earlier disappeared from the sky above Mars just before the demonic invasion began. Progressing into the base facility by facility, he finds that it too has been overrun by the forces of Hell, but also that its environment has become twisted and corrupted - wood, marble and stone inexplicably replace electronics, flesh hangs in sheets over walls, lava and blood flow and gather in pools, thorny vines overgrow large portions of the base, and various demonic artifacts and paraphernalia litter the corridors.

The marine meets more fierce resistance, in particular from enemies that were not encountered on the Phobos base, including the lost soul and cacodemon. Barons of Hell are now regular enemies. Balancing the equation somewhat is the marine's timely discovery of the plasma rifle, a UAC-developed energy weapon with a high rate of fire and equally impressive damage output. At the end of the episode, the marine must face the almighty cyberdemon lord who rules over the lost base from the newly constructed Tower of Babel. Upon his victory in battle, the marine learns the terrible truth - that Deimos now floats above Hell itself. Determined to trace the invasion to its ultimate source, he then rappels down to the surface of Hell to continue his battle.

Levels

 * E2M1: Deimos Anomaly
 * E2M2: Containment Area
 * E2M3: Refinery (Exit to secret level; SNES only)
 * E2M4: Deimos Lab
 * E2M5: Command Center (Exit to secret level)
 * E2M6: Halls of the Damned
 * E2M7: Spawning Vats
 * E2M8: Tower of Babel (Cyberdemon is boss)
 * E2M9: Fortress of Mystery (Secret level)

Current records
The Compet-n records for this episode are:

The data was last verified in its entirety on November 22, 2020.



Trivia

 * The episode's intermission screen changes from level to level, showing how the Tower of Babel is gradually built by the forces of hell as the marine advances.
 * Many of the episode's levels feature UAC locales that have alterations or additions of hellish origin. For example, while most buildings still use human-made keycards for locked doors, some others use demonic skull keys. E2M3: Refinery includes keycards for the player to pick up, but also has some skull-marked door frames. Some switches found in the levels are UAC-style push buttons, while others appear to be of demonic nature. To a certain degree this is because the levels were originally designed to be plain UAC facilities, as seen in the alpha versions of the game, but were later moved to a more hellish environment. This decision was made more believable by having Deimos teleported to a location over hell's surface at the beginning of the game. Due to this, fan-made levels that mix techbase and demonic textures are sometimes referred to as Shores of Hell levels.
 * In comparison with the previous episode, many maps of this episode have quite low ratio of summary monster hitpoints to amount of ammo pickups available to the player. This is because of increased difficulty, and also because the number of possessed humans (who drop their guns when killed) is smaller, whereas the majority of enemies are hellspawn, who drop nothing.
 * Plasma guns appear in all of the levels, with the exception of Tower of Babel.
 * Monsters making their initial appearance in the episode are cacodemon, lost soul, and cyberdemon.
 * Throughout the episode, green marble textures with Barons of Hell on them seem to warn the player of a Baron's presence. Sandy Petersen confirmed this was intentional.