Review of Calm

by
, 2025-03-14, 21:00:33, Level ID: 110757117
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When making an art-focused level, the thing I prioritise the most is a sense of depth and worldbuilding. If you're building something to emulate a wide, sweeping landscape, it's important to make the background feel far more distant from the player, and naturally draw the eye to the foreground through use of contrasting colours or some other thematic element to make the player feel like they're "in front" of the background. The first two parts of Calm do not do this at all, unfortunately, as every layer tends to blend together as everything is very bright, and there is no attempt to make the backgrounds appear farther away with methods like darkening them or adding shadow to the foreground. There's also no use of a parallax here to make the background move slower, which further narrows the divide between the foreground and background and ends with everything looking very out of place and unnatural.

The following part is a complete departure in style, which feels very disconnected from the rest of the level due to not having any sort of focus on art despite it being well made all around. Thankfully, the following parts are much more connected to the first and use a similar colour scheme and focus on landscapes, and they also fix the major issues I mentioned with depth perception, contrast and parallaxing by making the foreground far more detailed than the background and naturally introducing highlights and shadows into the designs (particularly visible in the metallic structures starting at 0:52). These parts are generally good, with a good balance of designs, solid colours and a very strong theme, with good song representation through flashes, invert gradient effects and movements. However, the first half of the level is so far removed that they feel like two completely different projects, and the difference in quality leads me to not recommend it to be rated. This still shows a lot of promise, though, and I'd like to see more from these creators in the future.

OVERALL4/10
GAMEPLAY5/10
VISUALS2/10
DIFFICULTY9/100
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sorry about this gang