Rating Curve

This level turned my mind into a liquid and then drank it

The way this series went from being bright and cheerful and full of different distinct parts with plenty of early 2.1 nonsense mixed in, to this more serious, boring, and homogenous flowglow, with something between those two extremes in the middle, says a lot about the evolution of creating attitudes during 2017-2020

Been a fan of this long before it got rated. Great atmosphere, especially during the aboveground segment. I also like how this both starts and ends underground, it feels like the aboveground part is more natural, like you've simply discovered an opening to the surface rather than it being intentionally placed somewhere like it would in a more progression-based level. Also pretty cool to see chamber GP in a regular level and it fits the cave theme well even if it's brief

I'd like this more but the actual wave part of this is just the same 2 structures copied for the whole duration and it's kinda boring to watch. I'm glad this was the thing to dethrone VSC though even if it's massive downgrade

MIKE, TURN UP THE LAG

Horrible optimization aside (how do you even make something run this bad with <60k objects), this does a decent enough job at capturing ch4's atmosphere while having cool gameplay. No replacement for how it feels in-game, of course, but still nice regardless.

Update: Was the gameplay always this janky and unintuitive? I died at 94% and then dropped this for a couple weeks. Came back to finish it off today and yeah there are several spots that I dont think should've killed me

Now, I firmly disagree with the idea that every level using Iron God is bad. Some of my favorite levels of all time use it.

That being said, this is still generic, ugly, and awful to play, so it doesn't exactly help my case. Oh well

Mixed feelings on this one.

It has really good visual sync, but at the same time it's really repetitive and lacks any sync in the gameplay. But also that's kind of the song's deal (just because a song makes for good maps in some rhythm games doesn't mean it always will!). But this also could've been remedied by increasing the difficulty and making the GP more active. And also some pads are annoyingly off-sync. But dude that wave is sooooooo good and the theme is well done. There are some particular effects I really like but also that ball is lacking in them. It's a shame that this...

The review fades into white noise. You start dozing off...

Coin? What coin? "You have to put in a secret code and take screenshots and-" dude. I really don't care. Morse came out 5 years ago and even if I cared to learn the details of this level I don't think it'd be as good

Proceed

It's insane how Cryo made 2 parts in this level and one of them is boring generic trash and the other is so wonderfully crafted it (and to a lesser extent Walroose's part) still has me thinking about this random-ass level 5.5 years later