when experiencing most massive collaborative projects, you know on a conscious level that what you're experiencing is the result of a herculean joined effort. you know it takes an amount of labor and diverse mastery way beyond what one person could ever hope to achieve. but your understanding of the team responsible for the product and the process behind its creation rarely really goes beyond that. and that's not your fault; media of that scale generally tends to avoid getting you to think about the process of its creation in favor of immersion. thus, it becomes easy to treat teams like single people, to treat the effort put into those massive works as uniform blobs of labor, so to say.
don defies that standard with an efficiency i've frankly seen nowhere else on earth. it's not like at any point before the very end credits it takes the time to remind you of who made what, but despite that, if you even so much as glance at it, you'll be hard pressed not to viscerally feel that Someone Made what you're looking at. due to the sheer artistic power of the level's structure, every room feels like not only a cute little world to get lost in, but a peek into its respective creator's mind, their own views, interests, emotions, sense of humor; at every turn you're interested not only what you see, but who's behind it, and how it came to be. in that way, don has the extremely unique power of constantly making you aware of its sheer scale and collaborative beauty.
to ground myself in what actually goes on in the level for a little bit, the initial theme of conveying one vague aesthetic idea or feeling per room is simply fucking awesome. because of it, don naturally lends itself to being the coolest mood board ever, one that will have you in a rush of inspiration by the end of a viewing whether you like it or not. it's quite possibly the most clever way to format a project of this size, and it does an exceptional job of committing to it...... for the most part. as much as it pains me to say it, some of the less aesthetically-driven and more referrential rooms (namely drizzy, encounter, dropper, and dortnire) detract from what i see as the level's overarching themes a little, even if i do still love them a lot for what they are.
my final tiny nitpick is to do with how the level is organized. it's, at its best, a smorgasbord of aesthetics, and i think it would've been great to realize that by disregarding continuity altogether. putting superficially visually similar rooms beside each other not only goes a little too far in the direction of trying to introduce cohesion into what is already beautifully senseless, but makes it so i really wouldn't blame you for blending two rooms together in your memory every now and then. it really starts to make a bit of a blur out of what would've otherwise been such a well-defined collage with great contrast between each part.
i have not an ounce of exaggeration in my body when i say i find this to be the best work of art, ever. i'm so captivated by every milimeter of it, i'm incredibly proud of everyone in tm for having made it what it is.