Rating Curve

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.

I love me a good sky themed level. Soleil has some really solid, consistent designs across its runtime, and the pillar structures work pretty well here by creating more verticality in the foregrounds, which sells the lack of "bounds" and makes the level overall feel a lot bigger. The same goes for the multiple layers of wind and rainbows - the foreground ones are more visible, brighter and are used as accent pieces in areas with less block design to fill space and add a bit of colour, while the background ones are much larger and dimmer. A lot of elements of this level use this sort of simple parallax to create extra depth, and the consistency with its incorporation is a big part of what makes it work.

One of my criticisms of Soleil is the effects. In concept, I love the idea of the blocks flying apart and disintegrating in the intense sections, but the effect is quite blocky and the movement is too regular to feel natural. It definitely needs some more variation in the particle size, speed and rotation, and I do wish it was incorporated based on some specific song element like the loud synths near the end of the drop, rather than just whenever the part felt intense enough. I also don't like how the gameplay is balanced, as the wave parts feel significantly harder than anything else in the level, creating many frustrating choke points that hamper the playing experience quite a lot. If anything, I would err on the side of making the waves easier, as the gamemode in general is extremely mechanically intensive and (in my experience) usually works better when a bit easier compared to the rest of the level.

The transitions are also pretty lacklustre, particularly the one out of the first drop - the fade to black really hurts the attempt to fade from one part to another and feels quite jarring. I get that it's likely to match the sun setting during the transition, but having the clouds disappear slowly and the new block designs materialize in with some sort of effect would have been much better for the flow between the two parts since it would create a more logical implicit reason for the style shift between parts (the sun setting to darken the background, the new block designs and the removal of the clouds all accounted for). Overall, though, Soleil is very solid and I did enjoy it. I would recommend this for Feature and look forward to more from luhlamar going forward!

Titanic Thunderstorm is a pretty neat Black Blizzard spinoff, although I'd appreciate if this was credited somewhere within the level considering how strong the inspiration is in some parts. I like the choice to include a lot more energy in the form of strong pulses, shakes, bright lightning flashes and more dynamic block designs, because it brings about a similar effect-centric identity and theme expression that KrmaL originally helped popularise back in 2.0. The consistent usage of lightning, rain and the brooding dark purple-grey colour scheme helps set the tone and keeps the theme very consistent despite the varying intensity created by the effects, which is much appreciated.

My biggest complaint lies in the block designs. Interestingly, the designs themselves are decent, using 2.1 animated lightning as an outline is a cool choice that adds some nice texture to the otherwise unremarkable designs. However, the structuring really falls flat, and nearly every part uses the same default boxy structures. KrmaL excels at using unique structures either as thematic pieces or to highlight specific aspects of block designs - think the Rearmed memory maze or the Falling Up dual. Titanic Thunderstorm neglects this, and suffers from very forgettable feeling block designs as a result. Thankfully the other elements of the level hold their own, and it's a solid Black Blizzard spinoff all around. I'd recommend this for Feature.

TRANCE TRANCE is something I resonate with surprisingly heavily, considering how abstract most of its storytelling is. I like the fact that it leaves itself quite open-ended and up to the player's interpretation, but from what I've gathered it deals with the experience of one coming out as trans and being themself, something I'm very familiar with. I appreciate the usage of blue and pink near the beginning to express this - the very dull, foggy blue definitely sells a sense of discomfort that the brighter pink or pink-white-blue sections lack. I especially like how much more open and energetic the level becomes during the climax, with the blue-white-pink flashing colours on full display and the level generally feeling much more alive and sure of itself, so to speak. I don't know whether this is the impact the level is supposed to have on the player, but I do love more open-ended forays into storytelling as it allows everyone to draw their own parallels to the events that play out, and helps make it that much more meaningful.

In terms of the actual level design, the pixelate shader is a bit of an odd touch - the level is vaguely themed around technology, but not to such an extent that I feel the harsh pixelation effect adds much beyond blurring some of the level's details. It does make the level feel more like a lower budget indie game, which is charming in its own right but again doesn't do much for me. The exception to this is the ending, as the increased pixelation here makes the part feel more like a blurry memory or a scrap, which lines up somewhat with the dialogue and the part slowly disintegrating into the "secret ending" of sorts, which is a nice touch.

The choice to use three separate songs for the most distinct sections of the level is one I love seeing people explore, and for the first two songs I think it works quite well as the Cacola song found in the second part feels much more hopeful and bright than that of the first, nicely aligning with the themes of taking back self control and finding yourself. The third part is one I don't like as much, as while I like the amount of depth and variation in the backgrounds and structuring styles, I don't think this is very conducive to the brash, repetitive Tanger song that was chosen, and it makes this part feel lacking in having a strong identity or direction. Overall, though, TRANCE TRANCE is a super fascinating level and quite a sweet exploration of the trans experience as a whole. I'd recommend this for Feature or Epic and will be keeping up with OctoAngel's works going forward.

I'm not secretive about disliking most "Nine Circles" levels as I feel the concept has been used and reused into the ground - it's rare to see a level do something unique in the genre, but Mujigae manages it to a surprising degree. I like Mujigae's approach to lean fully into its very saturated rainbow colours, doing away with flashing the structures like a typical NC level and rather having the colours pulse from outside to inside. This approach allows YGYoshI to play around with blending far more than otherwise, letting the foreground and background almost meld together into a flashy mess, while the slightly disconnected pulse timings created by the aforementioned effect contrast just enough to let the player know where the structures are. This is not only very unique, but also creates a lot of interesting textures where the negative space in between the structure blocks overlaps with the background designs (namely in the second part of the drop, the background circles giving the blank spots the look of a sideways pulsing effect that doesn't exist).

This is ultimately a more specific example of the main thing I enjoy about Mujigae; it goes against the general conventions of most NC levels in almost every aspect. The song is much brighter and happier (and less bassy) than the gritty dubstep used in the most famous levels of the genre, which gives an implicit reason for the exceedingly bright rainbow colours by way of association, as at least in my mind I associate rainbow levels like this with the whimsical and joyous far more than with something like dubstep. The typical cube-ship-ball-wave-cube gamemode progression is also done away with completely, with the predrop using every single gamemode except for wave.

This is where my praise ends, though, as there's very little overall cohesion to these parts aside from colour scheme. The usage of the gamemodes themselves is underwhelming, often throwing many gamemode portals into one part with no change in gameplay/visual style or the song. I would have liked more usage of each gamemode and its unique mechanics and physics to be worked into the part's ideas; the one part of the predrop that I feel does this quite well is the UFO, where the clouds and floating structures feel right at home with where a UFO would intuitively find itself. The designs in these parts are quite basic, and don't make good use of the blending like the drop does, with the bright backgrounds frequently washing away important details in the structures rather than adding to them, namely the ball section close to the drop. This leaves the non-drop parts without any real identity beyond their colour scheme, which is just disappointing when there's so much more to this level and its ideas than just a "rainbow nine circles level". I only wish YGYoshI ran with that more when making the level, because otherwise this is one of the best Nine Circles levels to date.

To start off, I'd really like to point out just how ahead of their time Optical's designs in the first and last part are. The two-layered, unusually shaped structures are simple, but quite visually striking because of the contrast between the "roof" of the 2.0 fake 3D blocks and the "interior" of the glass effect blocks. That sort of contrast goes such a long way towards elevating simple designs, and this is on full display here considering how slow both of these parts are. Haru's parts all reuse this square with layered blending glow in different ways - in the UFO, subtle pulsing makes the saws feel like they're shining in time to the song, which highlights them against the dark background quite nicely. In the ship halfway through the level, the pulses make the squares feel like they're expanding in time to the song's percussion because of the way their saturation gets blown out, which is quite a technically impressive effect to pull off for 1.9 and looks very nice. Lastly, the shining effect is redone in the final ship, without any sawblades this time and simply as air decoration. I don't think this is as effective, but it still looks pretty nice and works well enough as a negative space filler such that the part doesn't feel like it's missing anything.

One specific thing I'd like to touch on are the crystals in the ball part around 27%. While these aren't anything new, I love the usage of pulsing different groups of crystals in time to the music. It feels like light is flashing or refracting off of them, helped by the little glow stars placed over some of the bigger crystals, and it's a surprisingly convincing effect considering only 4 groups of crystals are used and their individual designs barely change, just their positioning and angle. I do think the claustrophobic gameplay is a big contributing factor here, as making the part feel more cavelike helps sell the illusion better. This is my favourite example of Haru and Optical's technical prowess in the editor in Reinstall, but the whole level shows a ton of skill on both creator's parts, and results in quite an enjoyale final product.

Levels like these take me back, and it's crazy to see how prevalent a lot of the fundamentals shown in Ebb still are today. I'm a big fan of how SirHadoken uses specific shapes within the structures in order to make them feel like they "fit together" nicely - particularly, around 0:25 where multiple layers are introduced. I like how the inner highlights of the rectangle-in-rectangle structures are hue shifted slightly to make them stand out more and create a more distinct set of layers within the blocks, and the black corner pieces used as an accent also accomplish the same goal quite well. I'm especially a fan of the "stacked" structures with multiple vertical layers, as the contrast between their base colours (including black and white) and the often complementary outline colour makes every detail stand out very nicely against the simple backgrounds.

The structuring also makes the gameplay very intuitive, a concept that even nowadays I still don't see done very often in easier levels. Black groundspikes are used to fill spaces between structures, but only when the player might expect a path to be where the groundspikes are, which does a good job making the intended path clearer while also filling some excess negative space. This is most prevalent around 0:53 with the more open, blocky structures in the UFO part, and particularly here it works well because of the high verticality of the part creating some ambiguity in regards to the intended path with traditional structuring. SirHadoken also uses some translucent bricks to "connect" many of the structures vertically, which grounds them to each other and makes the level as a whole feel more complete and reduces the feeling of structures "floating" in space with no attachment to anything else in the level. (edited)

Ebb isn't perfect; many of the colour choices are pretty jarring (especially the complementary ones) or washed out, the air decoration lacks much thought behind it and consists mostly of randomly placed saw decoration, and the structuring shape does get quite repetitive as it rarely changes throughout the level. However, given the limited editor tools available, and the general state of created levels around mid 2.0, Ebb is quite impressive and very ahead of its time, and demonstrates a good understanding of many design fundamentals that are still in use today.

This was actually one of the first levels I ever beat upon returning to GD in 2019, and it's stuck with me ever since for a few reasons. The level centers around an encounters with a spinning golden orb and a giant, towering golden dragon, which feels quite fitting considering the huge, orchestral Xtrullor song that was chosen.

The bosses themselves are my favourite parts of the level, with attack patterns that are telegraphed reasonably well, while also being intuitive enough to not feel particularly unfair to learn. The attack hitboxes match their visual counterparts very well overall, and both bosses have smooth animations that help tell the player what attack is coming, from spinning laser cannons in the first encounter to a massive breath of fire and sawblades in the second. The second part also has a fantastic spinning background that makes the player feel like they're in a huge arena, which makes the fight feel far more intimidating.

The parts between the fights are a bit of a mixed bag. The two main buildup parts are the better ones, with the former's massive humanoid figure making the player feel absolutely miniscule as it towers over the mountainscape, which helps build a lot of tension in the lead up to the boss. The second buildup isn't quite as memorable, but the dark, murky atmosphere with little glow balls flying around akin to fireflies does feel like you're entering a sort of cave or lair. It's not as effective at building tension, but it gets the job done well enough.

In regards to the very beginning, I'm not as much of a fan. The structuring and designs are quite basic and don't really match with the rest of the level at all, especially the part with the waterfalls (which, as an aside, have some bafflingly poor colour work as the white and deep, saturated blue clash quite badly). These sections could do with a lot more in the foreground; variation in structuring style, designs more reminiscent of the ancient architecture seen later in the level, and more layered backgrounds to add some much-needed depth similarly to how the ending does. Overall, though, Against The God is a classic and still holds up quite well all these years later. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for a good, fairly easy bossfight.

dawnii proves once again her skill with design-based levels with vigilante. This level takes clear inspiration from creators the likes of Shocksidian, Loogiah, and Lieb, with a very distinct design style comprised mostly of well-placed default blocks and diverse colour palettes. While I like this style on its own, I love the elements dawnii has incorporated of her own style in order to give vigilante more flair and distance it from pre-existing levels. In particular, the structuring and gameplay are consistently wacky and unique, but also some of the best I've ever seen in a level of this style. The structuring does an excellent job of filling space in the level while not being overbearing, and many of the wild shapes they take are quite cool to look at too (particularly in the first 2 drop parts). The gameplay is super fun, well synced, balanced nicely and makes great use of duals to convey the high intensity of the drop sections.

My only major complaint about vigilante is its lack of variation, and this is what I believe holds it back. The level's style and (aside from the gameplay) song expression stay quite consistent throughout the level, despite the music changing dramatically. This isn't necessarily bad, but in such an energetic level it ends up feeling pretty monotonous by the end, and many parts end up blending together due to having similar designs and colours throughout. I would have loved to see even some small touches to separate one part from the next - incorporation of movements, more effects, different colour schemes or more unique designs would have all helped to address this.

All in all, vigilante is definitely my favourite level from dawnii, and she's shown a lot of growth as a creator here. This is a very strong showing, and one that makes me look forward to her future levels. I would recommend taking more inspiration from levels like Synergy by Vlacc in the future in how they handle part-to-part variation and cohesion. Well done!

I've never been very interested in GD platformers, so this review will be something new for me. My biggest issue with platformers always tends to lie within the level's skeleton and design, as platformers rely far more heavily on game design skills than classic levels do. However, Rose Garden does a very solid job of being a standalone project, with rooms flowing nicely from one to the next, solid platforming and puzzle solving aspects, and cool extra content like the coins. The level's theming and overall interactivity with the player are good, nothing spectacular but the aforementioned coins, the spike gimmicks (especially the reversed spikes in the moon rooms) and the backgrounds are all very good. Additionally, pretty much every visual element contributed to the level's namesake theme - the rose tunnel is ever present throughout most of the level, the large multicoloured spikes and moon rooms feel almost like stained glass shards or windows, and overall the level feels very cohesive.

My only major complaint is that I just don't find it very fun to play. The gameplay is quite one-dimensional and linear, not giving the player much control over when or how they approach each room. This contributes to a noticeable lack of replayability with the level (other than to obtain the coins). Less linearity to the room order, more optional rooms, and randomised decoration/encounters would all be great things to try and implement to address this. Aside from that, the rose rooms could have used some more visual variation, as well as something to connect them to the moon rooms stylistically, but that's a bit more nitpicky and a minor flaw.

Despite me being the World's Biggest Platformer HaterTM, Rose Garden impressed me with its visuals, theming and interactivity. I hope that in the future, more levels follow in similar footsteps and create better standalone platformer experiences for players who are interested in them. I'd love to see this get featured or epic. Well done!