worth the culmination of the past 2 years

good visuals pretty awful visual storytelling

2 parts before the middle cutscene are crazy

QuazeryIceCube's structuring never fails to impress. I absolutely love repetition in small gameplay structures or motifs synced with corresponding repeating elements of the song, and that is everywhere in Spacious Senses. There's so many little sections that repeat 3-5 times in time with the song's echoing synths or drum loops, I really appreciate the consistency and attention to detail in this regard - it's damn impressive that every single noise in this song comes through in one way or another.

I also love the use of default blocks to create art designs, like the flowers and stars near the beginning. In a period dominated by more realistic art that leans towards breaking the bounds of what GD is, these little additions are small, and don't really impact the level's theming or vibes much, but are something I personally appreciate. This applies in a much more impactful manner to the massive geometric shapes created by the blocks and orbs from around 1:40 onwards, with the gameplay forming circles, pillars, tunnels and other shapes. The open gameplay, geometric designs and repeating gameplay all combine to create one of the most visually striking parts I've seen this year.

On top of all this, I found Spacious Senses to be quite a fun experience; heavily reliant on memory, but without any notable choke points and very consistent. I can't recommend enough that you should play this level if you enjoyed any of Quazery's earlier works; it is not only one of my favourites from them, but one that is very characteristically an evolution of their style. Great work!

Sparks Cry of Mercy does a really nice job carrying its song's energy, and has a more raw, unrefined edge that I think works very well with the very messy song that's used. A lot of the block designs are semi-transparent, which historically tends to mean muddy details and a lack of "solidness" to the structures, but two choices were made that I think help the designs out drastically; the consistent use of black "outline" sections, and the general bright colours and subtle details used in the semi-transparent sections. The darker outline portions contrast very nicely with the rest of the level and helps the structures stand out, and the usage of glow and the line-based designs help both break up the large chunks of flat black as well as to add more texture and detail to the designs. The interior semi-transparent portions themselves all have some sort of subtle detailing, similar to reflections bouncing off of glass, and are coloured brightly enough that they aren't muddied too much by the rest of the level and serve to accent it instead.

I also think the less polished nature of the level works in its favour in regards to the gameplay. The structures are all very simple, and there tends to be a lot of negative space between them (most noticeable around 0:49) that relies on the background as filler, but Sparks Cry of Mercy has such fast-paced gameplay and bright colours that I think attempting to remedy these issues would have drastically lowered the gameplay clarity. The simple shapes and excess of negative space combined with the aforementioned contrasting block designs all help the player easily intuit exactly where the gameplay is and what will and will not kill them, which in my opinion is a necessity for fast, high-CPS gameplay and contributes to an overall excellent playing experience for this level. The lack of heavy shaders or camera controls further solidifies the level's already good readability, which is a nice bonus.

Some individual parts do make an effort to stand out - there's a fake 3-way "dual" at 0:51, a dash orb that breaks through one of the structures at 1:13, and some other nice novelties that are very cool additions in their own right - but overall I think the level does get monotonous. The colour scheme stays the same aside from the red in the first part, the structuring and design styles are the same, even the background structures are reused fairly consistently. While cohesive, I'd love to have seen some more usage of slopes, or another spin on the outline sections of the structures, or even a different mechanical/electronic style altogether for some of the more intense parts. However, I'd consider this a relatively minor issue, and overall really enjoy Sparks Cry of Mercy. I will be keeping an eye on ISGAgaru's levels going forward and look forward to more from them.

I'm a big sucker for the mechanical theming of Powercut. I really like the general mechanical-electrical meld of aesthetics on display here; in particular, I think the lightning present in the middle of many of the structures is very nice and adds a new layer of movement and vibrance to the otherwise static mechanical designs. This is at its best around 0:22, with the brighter lightning serving to accent the interior lines and designs rather than stand alone, which helps make the designs feel more "alive" due to the added movement and colour.

While I like the overall consistency with the gameplay and colour scheme, each part tends to have a mind of its own with the effects used, which is especially rough with the camera controls. Quite a few parts in the midsection of the level have either really strong camera bounces, or frequent sections that slow or disconnect the camera from the player, which feels jarring as there's not much consistency as to what these sections synchronize to in the song. This is most obvious with the very intense camera and shader usage in the part around 0:14 contrasting heavily with the mainly background and pulse-focused effects in the following part, with no change in the song to compensate. There's also a giant fantastical skull design at 0:19, which really sticks out against the mechanical block deco and feels very out of place.

Most of my complaints are relatively common in large megacollabs - generally, it takes a lot to perfectly align a group of individual creators on a specific vision. Powercut does a decent job at this in a lot of aspects, and is a pretty enjoyable play thanks to the high energy and solid designs, but suffers from lacking consistency in effect work, among a few more minor things. Regardless, I think this level is cool, and I would like to see it rated.

Pandemonium strongly reminds me of Funnygame and Serponge's genre-defining effect work from the 1.9 era in many ways, which is really interesting to see in a level from relatively early in 1.9. The technical skill on display is very impressive - the conveyor belts in the mechanical part close to the end in particular are very clean and the pulse looping is quite smooth and well made for only using 3 frames of animation. It's a subtle touch but brings a lot of life to the part and helps create a stronger mechanical theme in the eyes of the player, as the conveyors are a much more literal representation of technology than the vague grey blocky designs. The cybernetic grid part near the beginning is another good example of this, as the blocks are placed such that each group fades in and out on the same timing compared to where the player is, which makes it appear like each group has its own fade, and there's no clipping or visible looping either. This not only helps massively with the readability for this part, as all of the structures are visible for roughly the same amount of time, but makes the whole effect feel very cohesive and visually tied into the surrounding grids.

My only major complaint is the lack of overall theming in the level. It's a common issue in older levels, as fully themed levels weren't very popular at the time, but it does leave each part feeling like its own thing rather than a part of a whole. I think a lot of the individual parts have themes worthy of expanding into full levels - the green cybernetic part and grey mechanical part especially have a lot that could've been explored, even with the heavy limitations of 1.9. Additionally, the gameplay does feel like it takes a backseat to the effects more often than not, and both the readability and balancing of the level suffer (the aforementioned cybernetic part is very easy compared to the rest of the level, and the ending as a whole is quite a hard choke point with many unreadable dual clicks). Overall, though, Pandemonium is quite a cool level that I agree on the Featured rating for.

With UPlust being as old as it is, it's no surprise to see messy, high-blending grid block designs as is common with most levels from the time period. I don't have much to say about the designs - they're okay, but nothing special for the time and haven't aged very well - and the gameplay is also quite unremarkable, lacking much in the way of flow or sync and just sort of existing to provide the player obstacles.

One thing I do want to hone in on, though, is the city part around halfway through. There's a pretty notable lack of contrast between the foreground and background, which happens for three reasons. Firstly, the background doesn't parallax properly, so the three layers of buildings either don't move at all and coalesce into one blob, or the back layers move too quickly compared to the front layers, which hurts the sense of depth that the parallax is meant to create. Second, the block designs use the same (or very similar) base black colour as the front layer of buildings, and since the block designs aren't outlined this causes them to frequently fade into the background; lightening the base colours of the background buildings would have fixed this. Thirdly, the yellow highlight colours used for the windows in all three layers of the background are exactly the same. If the base colour lightens due to depth, it's logical that the highlight colour would start fading into the background, in this case becoming more of a pinkish tone rather than the strong yellow used.

Despite much of this level not being very noteworthy, I wanted to visualize how a couple simple fixes could serve to elevate one part to a much cleaner and more professional-looking status, regardless of the actual asset quality, with just some colour tricks and understanding of depth perception. I'd recommend this level for Star Rate, and I hope the feedback helps anyone looking to create depth effects in GD.

This is a really funny level to me because of how inconsistent it is. There's a few neat high points to it - I really like the way the ship corridors are used to sync to the high vocals in the first 30 seconds, for example - but overall the contrast between the dark, metallic 1.9 design style popular in levels like Tartarus and the light, upbeat J-rock song used is a bit absurd for my taste. In terms of the percussion I do think it works fine, as the gameplay is fast and high-CPS enough to well represent the percussion, but otherwise the two elements of the level don't coexist well at all. I think Tengaku being less dark would have helped a lot, making it feel a bit less foreboding and menacing to more closely match the song's upbeat nature, and also I'd have loved more consistent use of movement sync in the gameplay beyond the aforementioned ship corridors; there's tons of potential for things like matching icon height to vocal pitch, reusing specific gameplay sections on certain words/patterns in the melodies that would've helped drastically to make this into a more cohesive product. As is, I wouldn't recommend Tengaku for rate, but at the bare minimum it's a pretty interesting level.