My first review on this site! Glad to start off with a banger too. The principal ethos of SMITHEREENS is its object count, sitting at a whopping 996. I was grateful to be around for the resurgence of low object levels, since we got a lot of amazing stuff breaking the 1000, 100, and even 50 object barriers while still offering their own unique ideas. My favorite of this wave is still probably Colliderscope by Flash, having around SIXTY objects (???) and centering around the unfamiliarity of exclusively clicking a giant orb and having obstacles appear in polymeter. It's a genuinely really chill and fun level and I still love it to death.

What these kinds of low object levels have never accomplished, though, especially beyond demon difficulty, is to really transcend the challenge of just optimizing the shit out of a level's gameplay and effects. If you remember Untitled Unmastered or Ballyhoo, actually some of the more polished high difficulty levels of their genre, there's a clear issue with how repetition is exactly handled. Untitled particularly just embraces it, with the entire first half being so blatantly repetitive it killed the level for a lot of people. SMITHEREENS does such an amazing job of masking its object reuse I wouldn't have even known it was a low object level if the submitter hadn't mentioned it. It's so refreshing to play an interpretation of the 1k object challenge as framework rather than limitation.

I bring up the inherent aesthetic value of artistic limitations a lot, which is to say I don't think it exists. The context provided by a level's iteration on a low object challenge isn't necessarily what makes such levels attractive to some people, after all. Nor does a level's complete rejection of the premise, in an attempt to "outsmart" the limitation, necessarily make a level more attractive to any given person. Rather, it's the things that arise out of being low-object that make SMITHEREENS so cool to me. The decoration is economic and highly resourceful, two things I've come to really enjoy, and the gameplay is equally raw and straightforward. I never really enjoy timing levels on the first practice run, but if I took the time to learn SMITHEREENS I expect that I'd find it pretty fun.

Otherwise it's just kind of a cool modern level. I like the colors and the song a lot but my main point is that pretty much everything else is affected by the object count somehow and it's not really possible to analyze this level without the number in your head, once you know anyway. Never ask me to apply this argument to 1.9 levels it's complicated