I like this level, but I wish I could love it.

I had enjoyed DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's album "Charmed" for a bit up until I found this level, so I was a bit dismayed that the way I learned about this level's existence was in the trivia tab of either the Hypnotic Travel or TLWH GD Fan Wiki pages, don't remember which. An almost 15-minute long DJ Sabrina level was what I didn't know I always wanted, how did this fly under the radar for me?

I did a practice run and ended up beating the level on only my 2nd attempt in normal mode. I saw why this level wasn't as hugely talked about and why it probably only got a feature - the gameplay. While it does occasionally change up with ship parts or robot parts, Charmed Life spends most of its runtime entirely in the cube gamemode, doing basic jumps over spikes and hitting orbs, sometimes also pads. I understand how unfriendly the GD editor can get the longer you try to build your level, as well as that the editor ends at roughly the point the level ends, but I still feel like more could've been done to make the gameplay more enticing, even just some usage of gamemodes other than cube, ship, or robot. In this regard, Charmed Life is more meant to be watched instead of played since there just isn't much meat to the gameplay, and playing the level in-game isn't too different of an experience from watching a YouTube upload of the level.

The design of the level and the song representation is much more where this level shines, and it really does shine. Charmed Life is the longest and the 2nd to last track on Charmed, an over 3-hour behemoth of an album that is a rewarding and euphoric listen. This is a sense of finality to the song, and it is still energetic while sounding peaceful and even a bit retrospective. Charmed Life (the level) does its song great justice. The runtime of the level is spent traversing through colorful landscapes that include, nature, urbanism, outer space, and the places in-between. Under normal circumstances, I would be one to criticize the level for a lack of cohesion like I do with travel levels but I feel that's not the case here as all of the different sceneries go hand-in-hand with the song, they transition into each other very nicely (although sometimes they don't), and they also all just look nice in general. It's great that this level is able to have consistently great designs throughout. Sometimes, the lack of intuitive gameplay and the slow speed throughout (which is probably more caused from technical limitations) even helps the design and progression shine because, even while playing, you are able to comfortably take in all the environments.

The last few minutes of the level have me split, however. The song is building up for its final high and every sample we have heard up until this point reappears for the finale. In some regards, the level replicates this well too as every landscape we have seen thus far reappears for some time in sync with the music. All of the parts transition into each other with a white flash, and while this happens constantly, the level retains readability and clarity because the next bit of gameplay right after what you just did/are currently doing lines up with what comes next. What I am not a fan of in this part is the execution of the concept, as I feel it could have been done much better. Charmed Life doesn't just reuse the designs of a previous part of the level, it straight up just moves those parts of the levels directly to where they need to be for this part of the level. While I understand why this was done, to save objects, the gameplay in each individual segment is unchanged and the result of so many parts loading and unloading in quick succession is a lot of lag. For a level of almost 15 minutes in length, 222k objects is great, but this method of saving objects causes lots of lag anyways and I think (and I could be wrong about this) it may have just been less laggy and more interesting to create new parts of the level and gameplay for these parts.

Despite these criticisms, I still wish this level would get more attention, as it does a lot right. The modernistic, lively designs and the brilliant song representation deserve more recognition. I still have faith this level can be recognized more in the future.