Lowmarsh: half town, half bath
A canal town where the water rises during the race, the roofs become roads and a bell tower rings when it floods. Building our first level that changes while you drive it.
Lowmarsh is the second town on the Long Spine and the first one that fights back. It is a canal town on a flood plain, built by people who looked at a marsh and thought: houses. It has bridges, quays, a bell tower, a wooden speedway grandstand and a set of flood gates that close at midnight. It also has a great deal of rain.
Lowmarsh. Half town, half bath.
Water goes up
That note on the sketch was the whole design. In every other level so far, the map you start the race on is the map you finish it on. In Lowmarsh, the water rises while you drive. Streets that were roads on the first lap are canals on the second. Quays go under. The low route through the market becomes a swim.
The water’s rising. So is my respect for roofs.
So you go up. Ramps, loading bays, the flat roofs of warehouses and the top tier of the speedway grandstand become the race line, and by the end of the race the town has turned itself inside out. Vee puts it best:
Roofs are roads now. Local custom.
The bell
When the water reaches a certain height, the bell in the tower rings. It is the most useful sound in the level: it tells you the low streets are about to go, without a single arrow on the screen. Players learn it in one race and start flinching at it in the second.
Wrecks in the rain
Lowmarsh is also where the watercolour earns its keep. Rain makes the colour run, wrecks bleed into the puddles and the whole town looks as if somebody left the painting out in the weather. Which, to be fair, somebody did.
Drowning, as a failure
If the water gets you, the race is over and Vee has a word for it.
Drowned in Lowmarsh. How very local of you.
Next: the most important member of the cast, who sleeps through most of it.