Rating Curve

A concept so cool you'd be forgiven for ignoring how comically tedious half of it is. Maybe this one's just for the MENSA applicants, but for my dollar there were about two too many moments where I went "How the fuck was I supposed to know that?" Ending still kicks ass, though.

Making a spirited, vicious horror out of "If Clubstep was L10000" might be one of the most impressive accomplishments of a creator with so many to choose from. The best of a comically small amount of good remakes.

A revolution for the modern genre by virtue of being the first level to actually feel modern. More than sufficiently slick, loungey, such a captivating aesthetic - a level that owns being super polished and airbrushed. I don't know what we should call those knots-jayuff rounded-edge halfway tech levels, but "modern" has always been such a misleading descriptor.

Cosmic in scale yet contained within the bounds of a single screen, watch it flow effortlessly wields the full power of clutter and clarity, both visually and obstacle-wise, like no other. Killer playing experience - so much intimidation just falls away when the experience is so intuitive despite its harsh visuals, you feel like an artist looking over his canvas. It all just feels subject to forces outside of the realm of human understanding (the rotate trigger).

The vaguely bouncy, optimistic tone and lo-fi visual style could not be sold better by what is, bar none, the most fun layout ever constructed. Every click feels technically complex yet instantly intuitive, like a one-button RTS. It feels simply divine to play.

A glossy, high-budget action level that undercuts the potential intensity of its dramatic theme with an uber-casual, fun-loving tone - that wouldn't be nearly as much of a mistake if the gameplay actually lent itself well to this, but it's so curated, so structured even in what should be its rawest moments that fatigue sets in well before the end of in Silico's generous runtime.

There's only so much value in playing Duchamp, but there's certainly something to be said about how shockingly functional the playing process for this level is. Deadlocked's gameplay is the perfect amount tactilely memorable and visually stimulating to get a chuckle out of me, at least.

So abstract, so alien, so compositionally challenging in every possible way that it feels as though it MUST be naturally-occurring, creating the deepest solitude a GD level has ever resided within. Staggering. Subversive. Unapologetic. One of the most important levels.

The poppy, candy-coated aesthetic is a pleasure to soak in, but it doesn't salvage the maladroit overindulgence of 2.0 features that, despite being the most recently constructed parts of High Life, aged the poorest by far, even factoring in some charmingly creative visual designs.

It's far from difficult to have fun playing it, but I'd be much more willing to look past the technically-limited nature of Revolution's once cutting-edge effects if there was even a semblance of a unifying theme or aesthetic behind them; that just isn't the case. With retrospect it's clear Revolution shares more in composition with pre-1.9 levels, tragically subverting FunnyGame's intention to demonstrate the potential of the game's most influential update. Mind-blowing as I'm sure it was, patrons of 1.9 would have to wait just a little longer for the true revolution.