Rating Curve

Witty, well designed, and glazed with irony and poetic justice to top it all off.

Do you hate people spelling out art for you or creator commentary? Do you, like me to some degree, think artwork should speak for itself? Then you should ignore this review, but in short, I'll say that I didn't rate this high because it's mine, but because I'm impressed with my own work. For the people curious about what I have to say, I have a lot.

In the inherent nature of psychoactives and the human experience, due to environmental and universal entropy accumulating as consequences over time, an experience, psychoactive or not, should be different for every person who is subjected to it. Even for the same person, each experience will be different due to more exposures, spontaneous and controlled, to their environment and perhaps psychoactives. The main psychoactive compound in Datura stratamonium is scopalamine, a deleriant. The consistent story or experience I try to capture are the senses becoming off from standard, to going haywire, to becoming nonexistent, or permanently altered at the end. Based on trip reports that I've read I tried to encapsulate seeing things, being watched, feeling uncomfortable or endangered, sensory overload, and breaking down. I made the base interpretation of the psyche a blank slate, and worked my way to a then colorful, then messy view as the level progressed to visualize mental degradation under the poison.

When making this level, I was heavily inspired by works made by Jackson Pollock and Hermann Rorschach for their ability to refract and scatter the true nature of their artwork through the means of playing into the human experience, and by abusing visual noise and/or interpretations of what the positive and negative space in an image compute to. Critics and scientists found hidden messages in Pollock's action paintings post humorously, which made such work of his have a lasting impact, enough to where they would teach that me in my elementary school art classes. The namesake Rorschach test is a series of abstract ink blots used to psychoanalyze a patient in the past. Based on what the person saw, different assumptions would be made about their psyche and mental wellbeing. Aside from the messages spelled out in plaintext, I decided to hide messages in the structuring of the second half's decoration, the most obvious being "goodbye" in the robot. The rest of the level has much to say if you look hard enough.

To wrap this up, I've allowed multiple gameplay routes, hidden messages, included vaguely related phrases clustered together, for what? The teeth of the monster faces in the last spider are player colored. This was a deliberate choice to remind the player that they chose to experience this themselves. In fact, a lot of this level is an ode to the mysteries and randomness of the lived experience, and celebrating diversity of each person's ways of patern recognition and problem solving. Is it perfect? No. Could it be better? Yes. I really hope to expand on these ideas one day in my work and make something truly special to myself and perhaps others.

I'll probably clean up these thoughts later, or release a scripted creator commentary on this, idk

Really good debut with cohesive theming. A bit empty at times, but very good overall.

Good gameplay, and a nice, relatively recent coat of paint to go with it.

The gameplay is not great tbh. Sure, it's well play tested, but it's not great. Visuals are pretty, but not my favorite.

Through the desire to birth this level, we see a projection of the creator's insecurities. I do wish this was longer as it could be a good joke level as the aridly dry and layered humor is already there, and it's mildly humorous to me.

It's pretty cool I guess. Design is uninteresting but is executed well.

Honestly, Zoink shat the bed with buffing the level. Some people say thinking space 2 is like its predecessor in the sense that the deco is not polished or good, and I as well as every level host for this from the gameplay side disagree with that stance. We see value in thinking space for being a fresh and creative level made through inexperienced hands and clear thoughts, and for bringing lots of good ideas to the table. We wanted to expand on these ideas and bring the magic it captured for us to a larger audience, but this concept was completely defenestrated in Creator's Crackhouse (not my server name) in favor of some vauge, aimless idea where creators could spend little time and effort on their parts to get it done efficiently. Every creator on the team hired was already very experienced, and the merging and hosting was just awful; you can still see a part separation line in the level. That's not raw like a rare or black 'n blue steak, but like you served me a loin straight from the cow on guilded platter. It's flaws don't come from struggle or divisive artistry, but from laziness and playing it safe. I'd say we did a good job with gameplay as a team, but I feel disgusted that zoink altered katnblack's part the way he did.

Good idea. Very simple, but well communicated.

Beautiful expressionism. Somehow keeps black and white fresh for the whole time.