Already talked about this before, so in short: it's really tough to make something simultaneously interesting to look at and hard to see, and this isn't something that manages to break through that

https://x.com/Allodoxaa/status/1909751863731261864?t=QerXWyGvm43_q9rHgyVLTw&s=19

BOOBAWAMBA lands itself in a weird spot due to its difficulty contrasting with its visual style in a very odd way. Visually, this level reminds me a lot of Alika by 2003Devin, with flat, angular and mechanical designs comprising mostly of flat outlines and clunky movements. I'm a huge sucker for this aesthetic, and it's pulled off really well in this level in large part due to the highly detailed, moving backgrounds that feel like the inside of a labyrinthine factory. I'm especially a fan of the fact that the background layers are the same as the foreground layers, which further sells the absolute size of the environment.

I can't speak on the gameplay as this level is WAY too hard for me to play, but at least visually it interacts with the memory elements very well. In particular, the parts where the player holds a light are excellent due to the heavy use of decoration above the player. The huge, shadowy structures offset the light's added visibility and make the parts feel surprisingly claustrophobic. The structures are also sometimes layered in a way where they are only visible outside of the main beam of light, which is a very nice memory tactic and keeps the player on their toes, only catching glimpses of some of the level's dangers.

With that said, to me this level just doesn't feel like a top demon. The defining quality of a lot of the hardest levels in the game is how intimidating they are; whether from raw difficulty like Tidal Wave, intimidating music and visuals of death or otherwise deadly hazards like Slaughterhouse and Arcturus, or pure claustrophobia like qoUEO or Menace. For me, this is a huge part of what makes these brutally difficult levels work, as the choice to make a level so hard as to be permanently unbeatable for 99.9% of the player base should have some intrinsic justification to make it stand as something that intimidates the hell out of anyone brave enough to try to beat it.

Some shreds of this are present in BOOBAWAMBA, with the shifting, claustrophobic factory sections definitely bringing out that sense of intimidation for me. The parts that hide their raw difficulty, however, do the exact opposite of this by completely obfuscating their difficulty, with no real support from the visuals (which tend to just be fog or ominous shadow) or the song. This is mostly apparent in the second half, where the gameplay is barely visible and the song is quite calm. There's a big disconnect between this level's difficulty and how hard it "feels" intuitively, at least for me, and while I can't speak on how this translates to its actual difficulty, it leaves the level feeling disconnected from its own vision.

There's tons of potential for difficult memory levels to succeed - just look at how LIMBO is viewed today or how KILLBOT was viewed upon its verification. It's all about synchronising all of the level's elements to really invest the player or viewer into the level and its difficulty. BOOBAWAMBA does a lot of things right, but really fails at this one crucial point, and I hope in the future somebody does succeed at it.

The highlight for me is the last robot. It just seems so tense and nerve-wracking. Otherwise, the level is pretty cool but I would prefer if I could actually see in many of the beginning parts.

I would probably like this more if it was named something else. I know like oooh big number and all but I am not convinced that Googology is a real functional thing. Like its main hub is literally a fandom page I don't think I can be capable of being intimidated by that