The first time you enter this level, you're hit immediately with pure demon aura. Like you know this is fucking serious. The Clubstep monster is just such an iconic symbol, it shows how much Rob really cooked with this level. Clubstep fills the role of first official demon perfectly.

The spirit of Clubstep embodies both the archetypes of a classic trickster and the devil. It feels like Clubstep is an evil horrifying place covered in saws, spikes, and chains. Where the world is made out of monsters, immobile and unfeeling but still very much alive with their beating eyes. The level feels designed by a malicious force (devil), but there's also a sort of meta humor to the traps that are placed (trickster!). The gameplay is filled with fakes and traps that I wouldn't call fair, but when you die to them they make you go "Oh you cheeky bastard Rob ;)". So there's a lot of hate and anger and despair experienced while trying to beat Clubstep for the first time but also a background humor to it. That combined with the visuals of monsters carved into and creating all the block structures, and the background colors, really makes it like you're flying through some kind of Hell Circus. I think this feeling of flying through monsters' mouths and guts that make up the blocks themselves, like the monsters ARE the world, is felt much more powerfully through the classic GD style than a more modern artistic style could achieve. It's more immersive, not like art painted on top of gameplay. For sure the majority of one's experience beating this level for the first time leans more on the hell side, it's pretty painful and difficult. But I find I always appreciated how the traps were designed, and now the difficulty after the level has become easy for me.

In terms of enjoyability, this level is very fun, it's one of the official levels I go back to routinely to replay for the fun of it. While the trickstery gameplay is something people have moved away from in modern GD, I think it was very appropriate for the first official demon level at that time. Solid gameplay, decent visuals, ULTRA SOLID AURA