Review of Mujigae

by
, 2025-05-23, 21:52:41, Level ID: 38765979
avatar
says...

I'm not secretive about disliking most "Nine Circles" levels as I feel the concept has been used and reused into the ground - it's rare to see a level do something unique in the genre, but Mujigae manages it to a surprising degree. I like Mujigae's approach to lean fully into its very saturated rainbow colours, doing away with flashing the structures like a typical NC level and rather having the colours pulse from outside to inside. This approach allows YGYoshI to play around with blending far more than otherwise, letting the foreground and background almost meld together into a flashy mess, while the slightly disconnected pulse timings created by the aforementioned effect contrast just enough to let the player know where the structures are. This is not only very unique, but also creates a lot of interesting textures where the negative space in between the structure blocks overlaps with the background designs (namely in the second part of the drop, the background circles giving the blank spots the look of a sideways pulsing effect that doesn't exist).

This is ultimately a more specific example of the main thing I enjoy about Mujigae; it goes against the general conventions of most NC levels in almost every aspect. The song is much brighter and happier (and less bassy) than the gritty dubstep used in the most famous levels of the genre, which gives an implicit reason for the exceedingly bright rainbow colours by way of association, as at least in my mind I associate rainbow levels like this with the whimsical and joyous far more than with something like dubstep. The typical cube-ship-ball-wave-cube gamemode progression is also done away with completely, with the predrop using every single gamemode except for wave.

This is where my praise ends, though, as there's very little overall cohesion to these parts aside from colour scheme. The usage of the gamemodes themselves is underwhelming, often throwing many gamemode portals into one part with no change in gameplay/visual style or the song. I would have liked more usage of each gamemode and its unique mechanics and physics to be worked into the part's ideas; the one part of the predrop that I feel does this quite well is the UFO, where the clouds and floating structures feel right at home with where a UFO would intuitively find itself. The designs in these parts are quite basic, and don't make good use of the blending like the drop does, with the bright backgrounds frequently washing away important details in the structures rather than adding to them, namely the ball section close to the drop. This leaves the non-drop parts without any real identity beyond their colour scheme, which is just disappointing when there's so much more to this level and its ideas than just a "rainbow nine circles level". I only wish YGYoshI ran with that more when making the level, because otherwise this is one of the best Nine Circles levels to date.

OVERALL7/10
GAMEPLAY7/10
VISUALS6/10
DIFFICULTY86/100
Hyperbolus is not affiliated with RobTopGames AB or Geometry Dash
Hyperbolus © 2025
Connected via
Alakazam

GDPR Cookie Consent

Hyperbolus uses cookies and local browser storage to enable basic functionality of the site. If we make any changes to these options we will ask for your consent again.

Strictly necessary
Analytics and performance
Advertising personalization

sorry about this gang