Rating Curve

I don't have a ton to say about this one but it was nice to see in my requests. It's always fun to play a straightforward 3 star every once in a while, and this is certainly one of the best picks you could get for one. The gameplay is super engaging for its difficulty; I think having well-indicated duals and readable coins in a level of this difficulty is a worthwhile route no matter what the goal of the level is. It also helps players focus on the visuals, which are really pretty in Waterfells! It reminds me a bit of something you'd see from Subwoofer or Unzor before their styles developed into what you would find in their most popular levels. Very fun, nice song, pretty art, would be a great pick for a gauntlet level or something.

I've heard some great things about Neural Pathways around the time it released, so I wanted to go back and play a 2.1 SGameT level to compare styles. I landed on A Thank You because of the song, also probably happening to be their last 2.1 level which I thought was neat. It's a very unfiltered level, one I think much of the community would call "object spam." I don't think this is an inappropriate term in itself, although the assumption that it results in something poor quality is definitely misguided. A Thank You is a nice level, nothing too amazing for me but definitely an interesting launching point.

I've often claimed that there are very few creators whose style truly evolved to fit 2.2's new creative offerings, and SGameT is potentially the most obvious case. There's no way to talk about Neural Pathways without starting with the shaders, and how stunningly beautiful they are. I've always been a fan of bichromatic color work, which is used predominantly throughout the entire level, but the shaders elevate the effect to something akin to travelling through parallel universes, and even so none are less phenomenal in execution. Other common effects such as the color-altering gradients (I think they just invert colors under them?) and the blur shaders only add to this feeling of paradoxically natural vertigo throughout the runtime. My favorite parts are probably the ball and the wave, both featuring phenomenal color work and the most memorable secondary effects in the level. I didn't mind the simple gameplay - I actually think it's crucial to be able to fully absorb the effects for them to be effective - but the song just doesn't do it for me. Maybe it doesn't fit the visuals, maybe it doesn't really work for any sort of GD level, or maybe I don't like it in the first place. For now I'd point to the second option, but it's not a total dealbreaker. You should definitely take this as a high 8 though, Neural Pathways and especially SGameT's other stuff from the last year show how much the update took hold of some creator's styles and ascended them beyond their 2.1 potential. It's not as if the progression from A Thank You to Neural Pathways is unrecognizable, but it's certainly a very promising jump.

shoutout to girls

This song is really special to me and the level does a pretty good job matching the vibe, overall for a level with no movement its sweet i like it

I like these kinds of levels a lot, they can get a bit tiring if that's all you ever see anywhere but every once in a while a level like 953 can be really really cool. The song rep is one point for most of the level, I would actually say at many points the level goes harder than the song which is jarring but excusable. I really like the repetition of the wave double clicks at the start, and how they set up the end to be as surprising and jarring as the song is. Honestly the only point where i would say the quality dips is right as the level reaches its (supposed) climax, where I think everything just becomes blurry and hard to appreciate. It slows down after this but it takes an uncomfortably long time for the visuals to even get close to where the song is. After that, though, the screen zooms out to reveal some really cool and chaotic-looking line/block structures. No notes on this part, definitely the highlight of the level and what made it worth rewatching. Honestly a lot of things in levels like these can become a little too abstract to appreciate and discuss but 953 is just at the saturation point.

I have no real justification for this one, usually I'm ambivalent on glowflow levels but the idea of an insect swarm made this one stand out. Having an overwhelming amount of small things on screen is a super underrated way of building intensity and it works pretty well with the song and gameplay. The gameplay isn't anything to write home about, it's a good bit easier than similar levels which helps it a bit but otherwise it's very middle of the road. What really sold this level for me is the song choice though; imagining all the annoying dubstep sounds in the song as insect noises is just so inexplicably funny to me that I've always remembered this level really well. It's not the best this song has ever been represented with (Hellgate Menace) but it's certainly the most unique song rep I've seen in a level like this. I'd give it a 7.5 if I could but oh well I'll round up

Welcome to another instance of me talking about a very specific and singular event in the level for most of the review

I should be fair, Through Air does a ton of things that make it super memorable and nice to play through. I really liked how each vertical line was slightly slanted, even in later parts. The parallax is also obviously excellent and the fact that not much is going on in the visuals or gameplay complements the song better than I think most people would give it credit for. Overall the level was a really chill time and was a nice break from playing extremes I can't beat and bad space gauntlet entries.

What really sold this level for me was, of all things, the 3x speed ship portal at around 30%. For some reason the simple act of picking up speed like this while the song largely maintains its energy level just works really well. Pretty much every level knows that speed results in greater energy, and most of those will naturally use slow parts to build some sort of tension. Well Rested comes to mind as a level that does that a lot; the first somewhat fast part is like over a minute in and the drop is preceded by something like another minute of slow gameplay. Through Air does not build any tension in its opening moments, instead being a really pretty landscape reveal that syncs really nicely with some soft guitar strums. The sudden jolt of speed in the ship is arguably out of place, but to me it just felt even more relaxing. Otherwise the level is really pretty and I wish the middle parts could have gone on longer.

My first review on this site! Glad to start off with a banger too. The principal ethos of SMITHEREENS is its object count, sitting at a whopping 996. I was grateful to be around for the resurgence of low object levels, since we got a lot of amazing stuff breaking the 1000, 100, and even 50 object barriers while still offering their own unique ideas. My favorite of this wave is still probably Colliderscope by Flash, having around SIXTY objects (???) and centering around the unfamiliarity of exclusively clicking a giant orb and having obstacles appear in polymeter. It's a genuinely really chill and fun level and I still love it to death.

What these kinds of low object levels have never accomplished, though, especially beyond demon difficulty, is to really transcend the challenge of just optimizing the shit out of a level's gameplay and effects. If you remember Untitled Unmastered or Ballyhoo, actually some of the more polished high difficulty levels of their genre, there's a clear issue with how repetition is exactly handled. Untitled particularly just embraces it, with the entire first half being so blatantly repetitive it killed the level for a lot of people. SMITHEREENS does such an amazing job of masking its object reuse I wouldn't have even known it was a low object level if the submitter hadn't mentioned it. It's so refreshing to play an interpretation of the 1k object challenge as framework rather than limitation.

I bring up the inherent aesthetic value of artistic limitations a lot, which is to say I don't think it exists. The context provided by a level's iteration on a low object challenge isn't necessarily what makes such levels attractive to some people, after all. Nor does a level's complete rejection of the premise, in an attempt to "outsmart" the limitation, necessarily make a level more attractive to any given person. Rather, it's the things that arise out of being low-object that make SMITHEREENS so cool to me. The decoration is economic and highly resourceful, two things I've come to really enjoy, and the gameplay is equally raw and straightforward. I never really enjoy timing levels on the first practice run, but if I took the time to learn SMITHEREENS I expect that I'd find it pretty fun.

Otherwise it's just kind of a cool modern level. I like the colors and the song a lot but my main point is that pretty much everything else is affected by the object count somehow and it's not really possible to analyze this level without the number in your head, once you know anyway. Never ask me to apply this argument to 1.9 levels it's complicated