blissful simplicity

Takes me somewhere like how few levels can. Dull landscapes and skylines become inviting and empty hillsides and cities become enticing. To redefine the meaning of these things in such a short-lived world demands nothing short of mastery.

Welcome to another instance of me talking about a very specific and singular event in the level for most of the review

I should be fair, Through Air does a ton of things that make it super memorable and nice to play through. I really liked how each vertical line was slightly slanted, even in later parts. The parallax is also obviously excellent and the fact that not much is going on in the visuals or gameplay complements the song better than I think most people would give it credit for. Overall the level was a really chill time and was a nice break from playing extremes I can't beat and bad space gauntlet entries.

What really sold this level for me was, of all things, the 3x speed ship portal at around 30%. For some reason the simple act of picking up speed like this while the song largely maintains its energy level just works really well. Pretty much every level knows that speed results in greater energy, and most of those will naturally use slow parts to build some sort of tension. Well Rested comes to mind as a level that does that a lot; the first somewhat fast part is like over a minute in and the drop is preceded by something like another minute of slow gameplay. Through Air does not build any tension in its opening moments, instead being a really pretty landscape reveal that syncs really nicely with some soft guitar strums. The sudden jolt of speed in the ship is arguably out of place, but to me it just felt even more relaxing. Otherwise the level is really pretty and I wish the middle parts could have gone on longer.