was in just the right time and place for this to click with me to the extent it does, mostly due to finding bo (or as i knew them bbasic)'s layouts well before anyone knew them for this or vsc. it took them a while to get any real attention, at least with iconic their contributions to hard levels are now, but for their time they had a very distinct style- while it very much is just the standard for a lot of (especially high end) extremes these days, i'd never quite seen something like their highly structured click sync based gameplay before, in a time when people just weren't that good at click sync. if i had to describe it today, it's satisfying in the same way pennutoh is (especially in the fact that it's definitely not flow or speedcore despite being click sync, though it is definitely a lot more subtle) but more in the vein of icedcave's style of "looking difficult" (which also barely existed at the time), though definitely not as straight forward, kind of more grungy than menacing. the obscuring glow (some of which does look cool for the time) does a good job to hide this most interesting part of the level, but i still think there's something to really appreciate here, even as just a 'has to watch it because it's so hard' average player

By its own, this level is fine, however i cannot ignore how badly this level fails as a remake of El dorado, it seems like the creators didn't understand that in El dorado the decoration was meant to be a dense jungle or forest full of hazards and instead they thought it was a green claustrophobic place, and at the end of the level you don't even have any gameplay or decoration to show that you reached the golden city, all you get is an endscreen which makes it feel like either they forgot the golden city part untill they almost finished the level or were just lazy