This level truly confuses me. For every negative point I feel it has it has another part that's equally positive.
On one hand, it sucks because it's a complete and utter mess. On the other hand, I love that this level is a complete and utter mess. It is overly ambitious to both its detriment and yet for that reason I can't help but adore it.
There is something beautiful in seeing a mess that despite being screwed up and all over the place, is nevertheless filled with passion from every single person involved. Even if some parts haven't aged well, even if parts feel tonally and thematically inconsistent, everyone here put on their a-game and made something that is nothing like anything else I have ever seen in this game, for better and for worse.
Ocular Miracle is the most beautiful disaster Geometry Dash has ever seen, and I frankly wouldn't have it any other way. It is both the perfect representation and antithesis to what makes this game so unique, and why even after all these years people still strive to create, and in a strange sort of way I find that really special.

The ultimate megacollab. Aged perfectly and not only is it good through and through, its climax hits just like it always did. PUT SOME RESPECT ON THE GOAT!!!!

The story of Ocular Miracle starts with a short video posted 7 years ago- Imagine If... (READ DESC), outlining creators that the project’s host at the time, GaidenHertuny, was reaching out to collaborate on a new level. Ambition is very common in the GD community- hell, it’s one of the core principles that the community holds in their hearts, much to my chagrin nowadays- but this is different. This is the construction of a new Babel- a monolith to pierce the heavens, a proposed monument to a new frontier of unity and collaboration among GD’s finest auteurs at the time. It’s a pipe dream, but Gaiden was already in the process of gathering his ideal creators and setting off to work. Three years pass with various ups and downs. The tower is stacking higher and higher- above the clouds itself, forcing itself up through each layer of the earth’s atmosphere, until it breaches through to a vast emptiness.

It is complete, and it is an absolute affront to god.

It’s a bloated mess. Imagery of the cosmos splatters across its surfaces, screaming to itself of its importance, screaming to itself, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” Without any sense of tact or nuance. Its “speedcore” gameplay is ragged and sloppy, unable to decide on a shape or a mode it wants to be in. It randomly takes sharp turns, making any attempts to follow its direction impossible. It is a spill of a bright, unsaturated, monochromatic color palette. It pulls out more than all of the stops every single time, even when it is completely unneeded. Its moving elements move with the grace of an elephant, while its unmoving parts meld together like frozen soup. Any decision made in its construction, from gameplay to aesthetic choices, was the wrong one.

Soon, the tower collapses under its own weight, crashing back down to the hard earth with a thud. All we see now is forgotten ruins of what once was. You’d think people would learn from this experience, yet occasionally, you’ll see someone creating another tower, just as precarious as the original, trying to reach out to the sun, before falling back down into rubble.

It turns out, despite its collapse, Gaiden’s own Tower of Babel succeeded- instead of scattering its victims, it unified a community to commit to building many others like Ocular Miracle. Monuments of ambition would be constructed and soon after, they would collapse from the community’s neglect. These “pillars of the community” started off as levels like Ocular Miracle, but soon after, they started to take new forms- in our present situation, you could say our towers are focusing a lot on “graphical fidelity” and “cinematic experiences”. Their only constant is their ambition- to push higher than the others before they fall from the heavens back to the surface. There will always be monoliths like Ocular Miracle, pillars of the game that push their way above the rest, needlessly jutting out from the surface and causing destruction in its surroundings after the community stands in awe for a few minutes. Then, they pack their things, and travel to the next blasphemous edifice, to hoot and holler about to their non-GD friends, saying, “Heh… this is GD now… not just some dumb kids game, is it?” Absolutely despicable, the damage that levels like Ocular Miracle have caused to the community and its artistic merits. Many reviewers have commented on how the influence of Ocular Miracle extends to the trend of glowy core levels or to speedcore gameplay, but there’s more than that- it unified the GD community to build levels with the goal of universal appeal- reaching outside the GD community, justifying their decisions to get into the game, a decision that has hurt GD more than it has helped it. I mean, there’s no physical damage, other than maybe a few bricked computers and corrupted files, but this ambition is suffocating.

One of the reasons why I have such a vendetta for this level is because of how much this mindset has negatively impacted my own creating journey. Between 2017 and 2020, I only made one full length level, with the rest of my creating work being hundreds, maybe even thousands of unfinished levels. I hated my own work because it couldn’t stand up to the effort that creators were putting in their levels, that the non-GD fans in my life didn’t understand me, that I felt I had to prove myself for being this attached to the three dollar mobile game, and I was so blinded by the spectacle of those massive projects and megacollabs that I didn’t even realize why I felt so bad about myself. I secluded myself from others- I mean, I’ve played this game for a decade, and I’ve never had a conversation with anyone outside of the GD community about it! It wasn’t until I came back to the game, a bit older, with a fresh set of eyes that I learned to let go and just create what I wanted to create, and my output has tripled in the span of a year. Not only that, but I’m starting to feel proud of my levels. Imagine that.

I’m sorry if this was a bit of a yap session- I wanted to write something special for a 500th review and something in the vein of Ocular Miracle itself- a bit too long, a bit too messy, a bit too incoherent, very melodramatic, but I do mean a lot of what I say here- I was a dumb, impressionable kid who got caught up and wowed by a lot of the big community events that would go on, and it resulted in me developing a lot of bad habits. I wish I could make up the years of beating myself up over all my unfinished work I was too afraid to show to anyone.

Lastly, I know ambition can be used for good in levels- a lot of 1.9’s finest could be strong counterexamples to my main idea here, but I think there is a difference between the ambition of the old era and the ambition of the new era- there’s a much larger focus on trying to prove something to outsiders or breaking records in the editor today, whereas in 1.9 it was a lot more about pushing your own limits. Like, Ocular Miracle is a level fueled by ambition, but so is Death Moon- it just depends on what influences your ambition to create. I feel a lot more in the driver’s seat now when it comes to my limits and my desires for my levels.

Worse than the sum of its parts, the length in conjunction with a lack of a clear vision causes it to all blend together, and it becomes such a slog that it actively benefits from being split into chunks. Gives the individual parts a lot more time to shine ...although there are none of note in Reverie, which is also a major problem here. I have to sit through Reverie to get to anything that even perks my eyebrows up a tiny bit? Cmon now.

Also largely responsible for a really lackluster era in the creating scene from around 2018-19, where everyone was convinced this was the gold standard and everyone was trying to make their own versions of it. Did not turn out so well. Now we have Zafkiel7's megacollabs because of it.