Rating Curve

A pristine laboratory of checkerboard structures, swaying trees, and strange lights

You’ve always dreamed about creating the perfect GD level. Something that, after finishing it you can retire from creating entirely knowing you’ve made your undisputed magnum opus. Innovative and unique gameplay that also earns perfect 10/10 enjoyments across the board. Ingeniously crafted concepts paired with flawless execution, while simultaneously living and breathing its song. The culmination of your entire creating career, the thing that everything you’ve made up to this point has been guiding you towards.

Of course, such a level can never come to exist, but even thinking about it is enough to kindle some degree of creative passion. For now your progress as a creator consists of making small refinements upon your existing design style. To help you with inspiration, fellow creator friend KiwiPenguin offers a guided tour through his brain where you get to personally explore the various creative processes that he’d used to create his levels. You gladly accept.

Before you go, KiwiPenguin tells you that the tour is this new type of neurological experiment. He calls it “Neurostasis”.

A new type of neurological experiment

It’s Dreamer, but you are the dreamer. Here you see how KiwiPenguin conceptualized the iconic ship gameplay of his first ever rated level. You quickly realize how the innocent-looking spikeless structures only provide the illusion of safety—touching the wrong surfaces lead to a prolonged but certain death. The visual appearance of the structures is quite different from Dreamer’s, though. They have these snaking bits that are adorned with the colors of Decay. It’s like this simulation where the ideas he’s previously used are meshed into one.

It’s all very interesting, but you do wonder if it’s leading up to something.

A decaying dream

You still can’t tell whether it’s a simulation or a dream. Whatever it is, you can feel it growing more unstable by the second. It seems as if KiwiPenguin’s ideas are developing in real time as you traverse through them, and you wish those developments weren’t so hostile towards you. Suddenly the structures grow spikes and slopes on top of themselves, and the dreamulation starts throwing fake orbs at you as a distraction from the true path. The structures become increasingly animated, shifting in a manner reminiscent of Inane Demon except even more disorientating. Even the arrow guides designed to help you with navigation become useless.

With the fake orbs, slopes, and passable structures, the dreamulation ventures into territories that no previous KiwiPenguin level has ever come close to. You are plunged into a chaos of glitching structures, and you can’t even tell which ones are real. Was it KiwiPenguin who designed this madness, or has Neurostasis grown a mind of its own?

A sudden calm

The chaos comes to an abrupt stop. The structures are still broken beyond recognition, but you finally have a moment of calm to collect your thoughts. You’ve learned a lot from this whole experience, especially with how it recontextualized so many previously used level ideas into something new entirely. It’s always worthwhile to revisit your roots as a creator, no matter how much you might think you have “outgrown” the creative process or design style you used for those old levels. After all, anything you make is a step in the journey of your creating career—a step that will, consciously or unconsciously, influence everything you make afterwards. Whenever you need inspiration, you can always try looking inward. Neurostasis’ beautiful cacophony is but an example that demonstrates the endless potential of seeking inspiration inward and fusing the old with the new.

You slowly put the pieces back together, but you realize that not everything is quite the same.

fun facts about xuser morelike luser by akunakunn

• im not a luser

• i hate this level and i hate akunakunn

• for a long time i had the top comment on this level "like this comment if you hate akunakunn" which ratioed the actual level in terms of like count. so whos the real luser now huh akun

• akun originally conceptualized this level by randomly asking me on discord one day what my least favorite newgrounds song was. i had no idea what he was planning at the time so i gave a half-assed response thinking of this one random acid notation song that i heard once and thought was kinda unpleasant

• this level has some of the most hapharzardly gameplay ever put together. i mean especially for the last part akun basically said he made it by spamming blocks and adjusting it until it was barely possible. he couldnt even playtest it properly because the level lagged for him. also the entire thing was literally built in the span of four days

• i was the first victor of this level

• except no i wasnt really, cuz i was the original chosen verifier for the level so this is as far "first micktor" as you can get. i dropped the level because of how truly anti-me it was and how some parts were completely broken in practice mode and i really did not feel like sorting through everything. thankfully moistyjc (the next chosen verifier) is the goat and somehow had the mental fortitute to actually learn the entire level, fix all the bugs, and ultimately be a winner where i was a luser. huge shoutouts to them

• the level does have one of the most grueling curves that i have ever gone through but its also like shockingly consistent. it takes really long to get there but eventually the level does actually just click, turning from a jumbled mess of nonsense gameplay into something that you can actually parse through and have fun playing. whether or not the grind of learning the level is worth it depends from person to person though. I think building something like this in four days is genuinely one of the most impressive creating achievements that i have ever seen in this game, especially because halfway through building it akun actually crashed and lost a lot of progress. people who can create things fast will always mystify me because even just something like the layout of this would probably take me two weeks minimum. like yeah akun has made levels that look better than this but four days? holy fuck

• in hindsight its kinda lucky that i didnt put a lot of thought into the question of what my least favorite ng song is bc like. i dont actually dislike this song this song that much. i have this thing where a song i initially find unpleasant will actually become more tolerable if i listen to it repeatedly, and thats exactly what happened with this level. its not something i would ever listen to on my own obv but within the context of this level's visuals and gameplay... i dont mind it at all. the level actually fits the song super well, with a highlight being how the erratic speed changes at the drop represent the irregular drum patterns. akun himself has said that he enjoys this song a lot and i think thats very apparent in how he carries the chaotic energy of the song throughout this level

• The era of the comment ratio is long gone and now the level has almost twice as many likes as my comment. so i guess akun had the last laugh here

• i love this level and i hate akunakunn

• im a luser

somebody catch my breath...

Glow design is not easy.

Sure, you can call the style generic, uninteresting, or messy, and all of those could be perfectly valid criticisms. But speaking with my personal experience messing around the style in one of my earlier attempts to get a rate (detachment) I can tell you that glow design is one of the tedious, most effortful styles ever invented

But why should any of that even matter? Because why should I care about the amount of effort expended upon a level if the end result is a muddy, discolored mess? That was my thought process when I initially saw Collapse, or at least a cynical but vocal part of it. Long have I expressed disdain towards list demons that I felt got disproportionate praise just because they were solo levels, with Verdant Landscape being a forefront example. I would always say that no one would care about that level if it was a megacollab instead of a solo.

And yet, upon revisiting Collapse, I think I get it. There's something special about inexperienced creators with a strong but clear creative vision, and I think this particularly shines through Collapse even if it doesn't always succeed at executing it. The level hones in on capturing the intensity of the song, which is something I think the part at 45% excels at. Seriously this part is so unexpectedly good compared to anything that came before it. The screen effects do such an exceptional job at conveying this chaotic, intense feeling. I also love the switch-up from mostly drabness into this explosion of vibrant rainbow colors which perfectly matches with the climax of the song. The part after it also feels generally more effective in song representation than the first half, and I think it's also because of the effects used. Those glow beams truly do go a long way

There are parts where the level feels more lacking in song representation, particularly in most of the first half as well as the last part. I think this goes back to my complaints about the style, though. Despite the effort and care that I could tell was put into the block designs of each part, the natural result of the glow design style (especially with the more muted colors that most of this level uses) is that the parts sorta just... blend together. Which is not great if you want growing intensity of the song with each subsequent part. The lack of variation in structures between the parts does not help at all either. It's almost frustrating because like, yes you can still succeed with song representation with this style given the pop-off part at 45% mentioned earlier, but it's so much easier to do it if you veer away from the standard glow-design conventions that rule this level so much, essentially doing more with less. I guess my issue is not with the very concept of a glow design style but more with how this level and how many other similar levels apply it, where the way detail is used on the designs makes it hard for anything particular in the level to stand out. I'm not particularly huge on how the last part is executed either - it's meant to represent the "collapse" of the level with the greyscale colors, but i think this would have been the perfect time for the level to introduce some variation in the structures, particularly to represent this more ruined, broken-down feel.

I wish I was skilled enough to be able to comment on the gameplay on this level, because it's clearly the main focus of it. However the atomic cannon series inspiration for the gameplay is VERY apparent and as someone who beat and loved atomic cannon as a hardest I'm willing to give an educated guess that the level is probably really fun after a (really lengthy) learning process.

Despite my gripes with Collapse's visuals, it is a level that I truly respect. Any significant creative effort from someone who is primarily a player is something to be commended, and a self-verified list demon will always be aura-ful (I truly think this is the best word to describe it). Honestly now that I'm near the end of writing this review I'm kinda realizing that part of it is me projecting how much I personally hated trying to make something in this style. at the end of the day if this style of deco is what the creator enjoys making the most then they should continue doing it. :)

I still think back to how I decided to beat this when my previous hardest was acu. and also how this level is the sole reason for me discovering the idl and consequently like 90% of the connections i have made in this community. Wow

the level itself is like a 4/10 but +4 for the cultural impact

masterclass in structuring and song rep

Definitely feels like a level that would have benefitted from Not having an object count restriction