Rating Curve

pennutoh is one of the biggest inspirations for my layouts, in that he proved just how far sync and song representation can be pushed in a time when almost no one else could, while at the same time not sacrificing it for strange gimmicks, but he kind of had a tendency to host pretty incoherent megacollabs out of them that were less than the sum of their parts. thankfully, this layout exists, which i straight up think is one of the best layouts ever made in these song representation ways. really does embody its theme of Surprise, not in that you could consider it memory gameplay but something much deeper and less predictable than that on a structural level. most people are cowards about including invisible gameplay objects in their levels, and while it can be hard to build around, it can be really fun to play, especially that we have vanilla hitbox viewer now, there’s really no excuse, and this is a great example of them being used in really interesting ways

great example of a level that breaks ALL the rules and is better for it. silent circles and old death corridor were already well known by the time this came out and it definitely takes plenty influence (and objects) from them, but the surreal stream of consciousness state this level occupies, from the combination of the megacollab format, the consistent color scheme and background, and the hard to impossible to obviously physically impossible gameplay, really sets it apart from anything before it and most things after it. helped a lot by the song, one of those obscure kinda dissonant newgrounds tracks that continues to grow on you

alkali's gameplay was a huge influence on my style in late 2.0/early 2.1 but the way he did like, the exact same style for the entirety of 2.1 and beyond really wore me out on most of his levels and i kinda gave up on him. so its no surprise that my favorite's that one that tries something really, really different. but it is really funny that my favorite level from a pretty big influence on me is fucking super probably level