this level is a really nice sendoff in its place on the gauntlet as a whole, the story being told in this level is nice and the level itself has some really good visuals and gameplay, i personally dont understand why this is rated really low on both ends. although I didnt root for this level i feel like its simply overhated.

does bli just hate making gameplay or something? theres so little coherency in the gameplay here and its very clearly just lazily thrown together structures that kinda flows fine but also is just that. a bunch of disconnected structures. this isnt even the only bli level like this - practically all of his levels but a few suffers from this problem - but this one is especially bad. lets throw together a cinematic sequence - people like that one right ? ok fuck thats over and were out of material. ok lets take a bunch of unrelated backgrounds and paint them purple even though they have nothing to do with space. what are you saying? the block designs feels extremely out of place, like they were just random levitating platforms in a roblox obby? thats fine people will eat it up regardless. who gives a shit about coherency anyway?

w
The intro is easy to skip, which is good and should be standard for levels w/ intros. I don't care for the intro. The actual start of the level is just weak. There is a vague click sync that is harder to follow than just buffering, and it lacks the obfuscation of gameplay to put you on edge even in your first attempt. You're zoomed in for this entire predrop, and I argue it makes the level worse with how much worse the later cluttering feels due to it. The actual decoration here is just sort of alright, but there's so much BLUR everywhere you can't appreciate any of the detail. The only service of this extreme level of blur on what would be a pretty strong background is to keep focus on the foreground/playing space and midground, which is, unfortunately, incredibly bland. I can't help but wonder what the planning was here, because it's too cluttered in various ways to try and portray the "emptiness of space" with how asteroids/debris fly over the player and how the ship's debris is in the background, but there's also not enough to look at in the foreground for the entire part to be interesting. It's not lonely, it's not stunning either, but it feels like that's what Bli wanted to go for. The next part starts switching the background to various landscapes, much too quickly for you to appreciate anything, intermittent with blue constellations with an empty space background that also feels cluttered at the same time. The structuring here is just as empty as before. Some of these flashes are incredibly incohesive between the playing space and the background (the ocean and the bedroom, especially), where there's either very little structuring gameplay made of thematically related floating objects. It's incredible how cluttered the level feels when you focus on the background, but how empty it feels when you look at the foreground here. Then you go into the backwards floating time vortex thing, which looks Okay and lasts way too long. Short cutscene (actually looks cool) and a few unnecessary flashes to match the drums and you get to the drop.

The predrop doesn't produce any emotion here, even though it's clearly trying to; the background paired with these large structures overlayed on top (it does not help at all that you are zoomed in by the way) only serves to make the level feel cluttered. There's nothing interesting going on in the layer you play on, either. The gameplay feels like an afterthought.

Now the drop is actually decent with a few large pitfalls, but otherwise shows potential for a cinematic style like this to be good, and is why I refuse to call anything similar "slop" or whatever pejorative with no specific meaning people put instead of actually providing input on what's causing a level to falter. First, there's actual gameplay that, while not really too unique, isn't boring. More importantly, the gameplay works well with the background here, and the camera positioning lets you appreciate the genuinely good backgrounds and block design together. The decoration of the bottom half really feels like you're at a location and doesn't feel like structures stamped onto a background. You follow along the ground and see a lot of different things in those first two landscape parts. The upper half of the screen is just boring, though, presumably to keep you looking at the background. It feels like a layout was just adapted to fit the creating style without proper planning. The ending is pretty sudden, I'm not gonna jelq an endscreen over actual level that could be happening instead but its a cool animation regardless.

The whole level feels like it just wasn't thought through well enough, and suffers greatly in execution. The beginning parts drag it down too much for me to consider it a good level, but it certainly has some good points, but unfortunately it isn't that memorable regardless. 4/10

I was asked to review this so here we are I guess! I think it's undeniable that there are people in the GD community that are being actively hostile to creators, beyond just a showcase being quoted with something arguably mean. Even just on Twitter I've seen fights spring out in the replies of someone seeking some form of approval by confidently sharing a level they're proud of. More than that though, I think there's a toxic positivity problem among the people who see it upon themselves to extrapolate fighting against cyberbullying to be the Negativity Police against anyone who gives a level they like below a certain score. I'm not talking about when someone jokingly says half the levels on the demonlist are a 0/10. I wouldn't really mistrust the opinion of anyone who did as I'd believe that the difficulty may put some people off at a baseline, though I'd be surprised for sure. Anyway, all of that is against the point, I'm mostly just here to say we should be able to give 1/10 scores to levels if we don't like them. If I were going to lie about a singular number at the top of a review I'd at least overestimate if the audience might include the creator.

My main issue with Final Orbit is probably just summed up by calling it slop outright. The Space Gauntlet Contest had the very glaring issue of some very samey approaches to the theme, but what was really disappointing was how much of that homogeneity was present in the placing levels. Approaches like the ones seen in Echo Delta, Planispheres, Space I Guess, and 102 Blues were left aside for the same repetitive style of "here's a pretty background with a black hole in it." I don't mean to minimize all of the winners to this - some stuff like Out of Place and The Beyond broke the formula pretty effectively - but anything that wasn't just conceptually boring was only included if it would otherwise be triable as a war crime. It's fine for the judges to have taste, but the outcome of not diversifying the gauntlet selections enough is that all the levels for a contest get more homogeneous every time. Enter Final Orbit, a level which is so blatantly standard in concept (and arguably execution) that I feel a little gaslit every time someone tells me it's a fresh take on the style. Bli is very guilty of creating to fit the taste of the judges, as a once-charming and innovative style seen in levels like Fuel and Autopilot pretty much got swept away once his levels started to rake in the big bucks. Change of Scene was not a particularly daring level on any front excepting maybe optimization, and though it was good enough for what it was having it win over Seasonal Haven and Afterlife was far from a welcome surprise.

Rage Quit is probably the first time this sort of pandering was blatantly obvious to a large portion of the community, and it honestly hurts to watch so many good ideas get trampled by the need to keep the level overmanaged and flashy to get the clout it eventually earned. Rage Quit is so often scapegoated as the "key jingling" level because it really does feel like Bli expects the viewer (who I refuse to acknowledge as a player) to get bored if something colorful and hard to replicate isn't happening in every single part. I think the TV part is flawlessly executed and builds on the subtle narrative Bli is trying to induce up to that point, and then it's just immediately followed by this style flashing bullshit that was only cool when Rainbow Dust did it. It seems like most creators have realized that it looks stupid and very rarely fits a narratively ambiguous level, so naturally to be different Bli went and did it again in Final Orbit. I wouldn't particularly say Final Orbit is narratively ambiguous - it's pretty explicitly about an astronaut reliving their memories as they die in space - but it's not really reinforced to an extent where it really counts for much. Granted the quick scene flashing is pretty much just in one part at the end, but the whole level suffers from a visual cohesion problem that makes its narrative very awkward to parse thoroughly. Everything is just very blurry and it's hard to internalize why anything happens the way it does unless you try and work backwards from the premise, which was the case for Rage Quit as well and is just not something levels should strive for. Of course, this narrative superficiality also means that the opening of the level doesn't feel like a quiet emotional moment the way it might be intended. Maybe this could be the case coming out of the full intro for some, but it'll fade pretty quickly. Remember when Spacetime Continuum was getting backlash for having a part basically solely consisting of buffering orbs and watching the cube fly around, like a quicktime event? We're way past that now, the first part of Final Orbit is basically just that but regurgitated and deliberately put at the least exciting part of the level. It just feels like busy work to get to the part that was fun to make, which is admittedly also decent to play ignoring one ufo click at the end. Not to mention that the entire second half is accompanied by so much camera shake it's hard to even see what you're doing when sightreading. This is actually one of the worst parts of the level to me, because we're back to key jingling. Bli knew that the intensity built up in the first half was nowhere near where a level with such decorative caliber and a (supposedly) strong story should be halfway through. Naturally the solution was to create fake intensity by bouncing the entire screen throughout the ENTIRE drop part. I've always said that movement is a good way to build intensity to match the song, but it doesn't count when the entire screen is just doing all the moving instead, not to mention it looks hideous most of the time. In conclusion, Final Orbit is pound-for-pound probably my least favorite gauntlet level, and I'm way past giving out sympathy points because a couple people on Twitter told me I was being unreasonable.