Rating Curve

This level is unintentionally a pretty great commentary on extreme demon culture. It's just as entertaining watching Zoink beat this fixed hitbox nightmare or Seels beat a layout harder than Slaughterhouse as it is to watch whoever the fuck beat the next epic legendary top 1.

I think we should not pretend to care about the quality of top demons. We're here for the difficulty and nothing else.

This level is about nostalgia. There's this kinda vaporwave aesthetic to the whole level, with rainbow palm trees and Gameboys and such dotted around. It's a mishmash of different glow styles, core, effect and art. The choice of music helps this too, being an old TLT FNAF fan song.

This level had to be themed around this, since Anathema had such a ridiculously long development cycle (a large chunk of this level was built last decade!). It makes the whole thing work... kinda. It's a non-cohesive clusterfuck of a level that is presented in a way that works better than it should, but is no masterpiece.

It's kind of hard to talk about why this level is so great because it's hard to talk about why Devin is so great. This level is just the absolute culmination of his career, a giant marathon full of so many different ideas and themes and random shit - the definitive 2003Devin level

This is a gorgeous level, but my opinions on it soured slightly when I played Gris and realised this level is heavily derivative from that game. I definitely wouldn't call it plagiarism, but it would have been nice & my opinion would be far more positive if Knots acknowledged that many of the themes and designs from this level come directly from that game.

If I had to rate every single level I have ever played (over a thousand), the number of 0/10s I would have is less than 10. A 0 doesn't actually mean it's literally the worst in every possible way. If a level is bad, I simply feel nothing towards it because who cares. A 0/10 instead means that it manages to piss me off in a way that few other levels do, in a way that I simply cannot ignore or dismiss.

Alien Dream Emulator is one of these levels. This is the most cynical level I have ever seen in my life. The contest judges for the gauntlets have increasingly favoured flashy garbage over all else, so what better level to rise to the top 10 than a level so flashy and epileptic it manages to rival the Electric Soldier Porygon anime episode? It is straight up irresponsible to make a level this flashy. not only is it deeply unpleasant to look at, not only does it hurt my eyes, but it is a legitimate danger to those that suffer from seizures. We used to worry about Nine Circles levels being too flashy - this really is a sign of how much worse it has gotten since then.

This might legitimately be the worst level in the game. Not because it's completely irredeemable - I think the concept is quite cool, and it has two quite decent parts (being the start and the "emulating..." part). But it's the perfect blend of every single awful trend in gauntlet levels mashed up into one rotting turd on a plate decorated with the right amount of glitter to make Nexus viewers soyface. It is a microcosm of everything wrong with 2.2 creating trends and chasing mythics. It uniquely pisses me off in a way few other levels do. It is now featured in the official Space gauntlet, and will be there forever. And that is what makes it deserving of a 0/10.

Kidsmoke does something really interesting that I have seen no other level do before, nor have I seen anyone talk about.

I remember first seeing this level on Viprin's channel 5 years ago. It is on the surface level a very goofy "horror" themed level - the art is very crudely shaped and the colours are very bold and in your face, almost like if it was a cartoon. I always kinda scoffed at the level because of this. However, something compelled me to come back to it a few years later and play it. The level just seems so... odd, in a way that made me want to play it again.

When I was playing the level in practice mode, trying to learn it, I noticed that I was playing the level differently to how I approached every single other level in the game. Usually you either look at the icon or at the space right in front of the icon - this is obvious, because these two strategies help you pay attention to the fine movements of the icon, or to the gameplay coming up so you can position the icon correctly. You don't usually think about this aspect of the playing process.

In Kidsmoke, each part is uniquely built in a way that encourages the player to approach it differently. There are two types of ways it achieves this - the first is with chokepoints. Kidsmoke's gameplay is generally very easy with a few difficult clicks here and there. This initially sounds like a problem, but this combined with the usually limited vision means you really anticipate the clicks in a way unlike I have ever experienced.

...This is hard to put into words, so I'll give examples - in the second ship, the chokepoint is the one block gap after the red orb. After about a thousand attempts at the level, I noticed that when playing that ship part I had my eyes glued to the specific part of the screen I had to manoeuvre my ship into - the place that is obscured by what I'll call "the horrible face thing". The same goes for the four hard clicks in the following ball part and the offscreen blue orb in the following cube part - they are incredibly easy sections with one incredibly chokeable point that is obscured by T3 overlays (or the bottom of the screen) - and so when I was playing those parts I felt my eyes flicking back and forth across the screen to wherever the next hard part was. This made playing the level feel so unbelievably unique, even though the gameplay is not that unconventional.

The second way it achieves this is with the "fading blocks" gimmick. This is seen in the iconic wave part, as well as the mini ship part. The gimmick here is that the real gameplay is shown and immediately fades out, replaced by fake gameplay. The idea is that you quickly assess the part, memorize where the real gameplay is and then ignore the fake gameplay. This, like with the chokepoints, required me to flash my eyes across the screen, encouraging a really unique style of play. I also found myself visually blurring out the fake gameplay, which created a really interesting effect:

I previously mentioned that I had scoffed at the level for looking so low quality. However, when actually playing the level, the fact that you are flashing your eyes across the screen makes you not pay attention to the art much. This is where the strength of Kidsmoke's visual design really steps in. Whilst its art is crude, its ideas are still there, and when you're blurring them out, it might as well be hyperrealism. With this realisation, the wave part looks really good, and the images of the monsters dancing in the darkness makes it one of my favourite parts in all of GD.

Kidsmoke is really one of those levels where you have to play it rather than watch it. I highly recommend you do a practice run of the level before giving judgement on the level, because it really shines in the actual playing experience. It is truly enough to turn a somewhat decent level into one of my favourite levels in the entire game.

A genuinely very good looking level with some very nice visual design - I especially like the giant spiral part at the end with the circular gameplay. That is a unique aesthetic if I have ever seen one.

However, my god, the drop part is so bad. What a way to kill all tension in the level. It falls into every single early 2.2 gameplay trap possible and leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. The rest of the gameplay is very uninteresting and is mainly sacrificed for the visuals, as is typical of a gauntlet level.

This is one of those levels that just completely shattered my entire worldview in GD. It redefined all of the creating principles I held and showed me what was really possible in the GD editor.

I'm kind of amazed at how a teenager was able to create something this beautiful and emotional inside Fucking Geometry Dash!!! Unironically one of the greatest works of art I have ever witnessed.