Never been a big Pixar or Disney fan but I still understand the themes of nostalgia and growing up that the level is trying to express and I respect the level for it. I think overall the level is very well put together and is heavily under-appreciated, however I’m not sure I like the black and white mode as much as the color mode. The text I feel is close to telling an interesting narrative, but it feels too attached to what the song is currently trying to say. An example of how this limits the level can be seen at the very end, with a text that says “then I sing my last word to you. You’re up against only duuust”. This level is trying to be serious, but to appeal with pathos it tries a bit too hard to insert qualities of an unserious tone (such as the repeating letters) to make the text seem more human. I think the last line would stand fine on its own without the repeating letters, like when the level used only dust for the first time.

That being said, I feel like the consistency of the text overall makes this level a lot better. If you choose to take the path with the text, you’ll be reading a narrative throughout the entire level instead of it only being present in a few parts, left as an afterthought to complete an idea. This level does depend on its text, but it seems to do so in a more natural way. I don’t like comparing levels to each other, but I feel like Split Path by Jayuff is important to bring up here to show how text does not inherently make a level worse by telling instead of showing, though more focus is put upon the text in Split Path than in PIX. The nature of having to focus on playing Geometry Dash is somewhat what limits typical the game’s levels from approaching telling ideas through text, since unless you make a level auto you have to focus on multiple things at once and the meaning can only be absorbed well over videos. Levels usually don’t give you time to soak in their words, and if they do potentially the gameplay may prevent the player from actually understanding what is being said.

This is an entirely new side of the argument on whether “telling instead of showing is a good thing” that I’d rather not go much deeper into but I think this level poses some interesting questions to how we should approach telling stories in levels.

Visually, I think this succeeds at evoking a feeling of nostalgia, since the slow pace of the level combined with the old television filter work really well with the song. I like the way this is structured overall too; the level doesn’t feel too empty or too messy.