We lowering the average with this one 🗣️
Real talk, I actually love this level on a conceptual level. The concept of playing rooms that endlessly repeat and trying to find some way out of them is actually really novel, and I think it was executed pretty much perfectly here. And that’s not even mentioning the great aesthetic, with some cool machinery and symbolism to give a testing facility vibe. It’s ominous, but still feels pretty straightforward and approachable to a casual audience. My only real complaint with this level is just that it’s, like… not very fun? It’s not because it’s super awkward or janky, so it has that going for it, but the level really lacks substantive gameplay once you’ve figured out all the puzzle solutions. It often boils down to “click an extra time in this one place with semi-accurate precision,” really meaning that after you play the level once, or hell, play through a puzzle once, there’s very little else to do in it. The rating mostly comes down to matter of replay value. After discovering the main route… I mean, what else is there really to do? Deaths feel kind of monotonous, since there’s not much to engage with beyond a first attempt.
And speaking of death, that really brings me to my other major complaint with the level. I just find this level to be too hard for what it’s trying to do. Sometimes, to get that essence of “replay value,” I might hand this level off to a friend or family member to see them try it. A couple have made their way through, but more often than not, they hand the phone back to me because the gameplay was just too difficult for them to grasp. By easy demon standards I still think this level is pretty chill, but I would honestly argue that this level just shouldn’t have been a demon. Maybe that could be done just by nerfing the difficulty of the trials, but I think the much more reasonable approach would have been to add some sort of makeshift checkpoint systems. One that, when you die, will just put you back in the trial you’re on. I think that would make the concept stand out far more, because in its current state, it feels a bit overshadowed by the stress of dying and running it back from square one. This would be especially beneficial at the end, since that part just plays normally, making added deaths just… extraordinarily frustrating.
There’s definitely much to love about this level, but I think the structure is highly flawed. With some tweaks to the gameplay, mainly through some light nerfs, this could have been a really great time. Currently, though… while I don’t hate it, it’s rare that I ever have a desire to revisit it.
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.
sorry about this gang