Rating Curve

The most numbing level ever released. Repetitive and heavy-handed gameplay guides you into intimate subconscious understanding of every speck and strand of Lit Fuse, accompanied by one of GD's most legendary tracks and impossible, soul-stealing visual sequences. The complete stripping-away of sensation is so clinical, down to the little hand shake you do after the dual. And then, the awakening - still an iconic, breathtaking, landmark moment in history every time it appears. Nothing plays like this. Nothing feels like this. To date, the peak of Krmal's illustrious career.

A long look inward disguised as a bold, techno-action joyride; a skyward song and dramatic shifts in scale make such noxious, inhuman mechanical trials downright life-affirming - to that end, some of the most harshly satisfying gameplay ever, in all its bumpy imprecision. Afterwards, a simple acknowledgement that you're still kicking. There simply hasn't been such a pure, enthusiastic vision in so long.

GD's premier surrealist thriller, and a level that could only be realized after years of GD's finest creators overthinking and overproducing their best efforts to legitimize the medium as a storytelling device. The distinctly-human horror of unrequited love manifests in the haunting twings and twangs, the way the block facades fade away as you approach, the weaponized normality not only of playing through dual sections alone but also being sent, as if by god, through maddeningly "standardized" main level sequences when the intricacies of its visual design have already been revealed: everything mixes and meshes into a stomach-churning premonition and a point of self-realization at once, and leaves behind one of the most compelling, tonally perfect, iconic levels the game has ever seen.