A pristine laboratory of checkerboard structures, swaying trees, and strange lights

You’ve always dreamed about creating the perfect GD level. Something that, after finishing it you can retire from creating entirely knowing you’ve made your undisputed magnum opus. Innovative and unique gameplay that also earns perfect 10/10 enjoyments across the board. Ingeniously crafted concepts paired with flawless execution, while simultaneously living and breathing its song. The culmination of your entire creating career, the thing that everything you’ve made up to this point has been guiding you towards.

Of course, such a level can never come to exist, but even thinking about it is enough to kindle some degree of creative passion. For now your progress as a creator consists of making small refinements upon your existing design style. To help you with inspiration, fellow creator friend KiwiPenguin offers a guided tour through his brain where you get to personally explore the various creative processes that he’d used to create his levels. You gladly accept.

Before you go, KiwiPenguin tells you that the tour is this new type of neurological experiment. He calls it “Neurostasis”.

A new type of neurological experiment

It’s Dreamer, but you are the dreamer. Here you see how KiwiPenguin conceptualized the iconic ship gameplay of his first ever rated level. You quickly realize how the innocent-looking spikeless structures only provide the illusion of safety—touching the wrong surfaces lead to a prolonged but certain death. The visual appearance of the structures is quite different from Dreamer’s, though. They have these snaking bits that are adorned with the colors of Decay. It’s like this simulation where the ideas he’s previously used are meshed into one.

It’s all very interesting, but you do wonder if it’s leading up to something.

A decaying dream

You still can’t tell whether it’s a simulation or a dream. Whatever it is, you can feel it growing more unstable by the second. It seems as if KiwiPenguin’s ideas are developing in real time as you traverse through them, and you wish those developments weren’t so hostile towards you. Suddenly the structures grow spikes and slopes on top of themselves, and the dreamulation starts throwing fake orbs at you as a distraction from the true path. The structures become increasingly animated, shifting in a manner reminiscent of Inane Demon except even more disorientating. Even the arrow guides designed to help you with navigation become useless.

With the fake orbs, slopes, and passable structures, the dreamulation ventures into territories that no previous KiwiPenguin level has ever come close to. You are plunged into a chaos of glitching structures, and you can’t even tell which ones are real. Was it KiwiPenguin who designed this madness, or has Neurostasis grown a mind of its own?

A sudden calm

The chaos comes to an abrupt stop. The structures are still broken beyond recognition, but you finally have a moment of calm to collect your thoughts. You’ve learned a lot from this whole experience, especially with how it recontextualized so many previously used level ideas into something new entirely. It’s always worthwhile to revisit your roots as a creator, no matter how much you might think you have “outgrown” the creative process or design style you used for those old levels. After all, anything you make is a step in the journey of your creating career—a step that will, consciously or unconsciously, influence everything you make afterwards. Whenever you need inspiration, you can always try looking inward. Neurostasis’ beautiful cacophony is but an example that demonstrates the endless potential of seeking inspiration inward and fusing the old with the new.

You slowly put the pieces back together, but you realize that not everything is quite the same.