Rating Curve

If you were to tell me that three legendary creators, cometface, Serponge, and AudieoVisual, were all teaming up to create a Space Gauntlet entry, I would've been absolutely pumped. With three creators who have impacted the game and have been around for years as well as having a great lineup of solo levels, the stakes are high! And...

It's because of this expectation that makes me quite disappointed with Echo Delta. I'll get what I like out of the way first. This level nails being able to establish a huge sense of scale. cometface's part is visually stunning, easily some of their best work. I also really liked the ABEL-type wave effect Audieo was able to pull off in his part. There's a lot of things that are well done here, but what has me confused is where any of these parts belong in the collab. Echo Delta feels very incohesive and it almost feels like if the three creators all made solo Space Gauntlet entries and then merged them all together. It's pretty obvious who built what due to each part standing out too much from the others, from design to theme to gameplay.

While Audieo is a creator I really like, his part is easily the weakest and I feel he didn't put his all in the way cometface did. The sense of scale of gone, the theme is much more abstract compared to cometface and Serponge. He also uses that obnoxious color flickering spawn loop for the blocks I'm glad he has been trying to move away from in recent times. The transition from Serponge's part in Audieo's is a very grating stylistic switch-up due to just how different Audieo's part is how his part seems the most like one of his more standard solo levels.

I've also got some complaints about the gameplay. It's good for the most part, but there are some things I don't like. cometface's part plays well, but it's the easiest and slowest part of the level as well as taking up almost exactly half of the level's runtime. While their part is visually amazing, it did get a little boring to have to replay every attempt. Serponge's part also plays decently well, however the free-form spider part had one click onto blue orbs that was practically blind and I died not being able to anticipate several times. When it comes to gameplay, Audieo's part is once again the weakest. I really didn't like how the gravity strength in the cube part was constantly changing without any heads-up. Outisde of that, the part itself is quite straight-forward with its gameplay so these gravity changes don't make it too hard to play, but it always catches me off guard. I complimented how good the wave part looked earlier, but don't let it distract you from how the gameplay essentially just boils down to "stay in the center of the screen at all times." The ship part right after it is basically the same thing: just keep flying in the center of the screen and you're good. While it is thematically climactic and fitting for being the final part of the level, this "gameplay" barely matches it at all. Finally, this level ends with a nearly 30 second long cutscene. It is a really cool cutscene, seeing your cube drift away in the void of space, but it could've easily been cut down in length to being just 10 seconds at most.

All in all, this level does a lot right but when it's all put together it's an underwhelming experience. I think I would've enjoyed a solo Space Gauntlet entry from any of these individual creators more than I did enjoy them all working together on Echo Delta.

If you've talked with me a good amount or have read my Hypnotic Travel review, you would know I HATE travel levels with a burning passion. I've beaten 18 travel levels, and most of them are uninspired, creatively bankrupt levels made for the sake of being long and latching onto a trend, and as a result I get nothing positive out of my experience with them. It's the case of everyone wanting to be like someone else with a complete lack of an understanding of what made Lonely travel such a smash hit.

With that said, Lonely travel is one of, if not the best level in this awful trend. The winning ingredient to the formula that nearly every travel level completely missed was a strong progression. In fact, almost every great XXL+ level, travel or not, has a strong progression as part of its formula. This is why Lonely travel has the right to call itself a "travel" level, and almost every other "travel" level feels like a misnomer by comparison. Back to Lonely travel, the first half is completely black-and-white. This lack of color, combined with the slow pacing and sad song give the first half of this level a very melancholy feel. You're traveling somewhere to be happy again. At 60%, we see our first color with a singular beam of sunlight from the surface illuminating a flower on a rock at the bottom of a cave. It's a great, it feels like we are getting somewhere. In the next section, more beams of light are able to pierce into the dark, gloomy dungeon. Then, we are blinded and put in a new place: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and the air is fresh. The world has color again. Everything will be okay. We go through a forest and desert before the level abruptly ends at the 6 minute mark because FunnyGame hit the object limit. While the level ends here due to a limitation, I don't think there was a better place to end the level. Where would story go after the main progression is already done? Besides, the level is already around double the length of the previous longest level.

Outside of this progression being a highlight for me, there are plenty of other great moments to be found throughout this level. Namely, transitions are really well used to make high-impact moments. Two of my favorites of these are the transition from grayscale to full color I mentioned earlier, but another equally amazing moment is at 52% when the song goes silent for a moment, the screen is white, then the song goes into its chorus as the player is revealed to be in the clouds as the sun is setting. It's hard to properly communicate how satisfying of a part this is through text, it still gives me goosebumps. Two other things I really like about the level include the stuttery old film effect at 23%, as well as how well-made all of the parallax backgrounds are throughout the level. Lonely travel is a bit of a minimalistic level as it spreads its 30k objects over 6 minutes, yet it never really feels empty and FunnyGame is always able to demonstrate how talented and ahead of the curve he was in every part.

However, my main deal breaker with this level, and why I can't love this level as much I would like to, is its gameplay. I just did not have fun playing this level. If it was not for a few choke points, Lonely travel would be an easy demon. The part at 31% with the countdown and the fast yet stiff movement is by far the hardest part and where about a third to a half of my deaths were. It's so tricky to time these, and sometimes the block will fall out from beneath the player and they will need to hit an orb, so there is also some memory involved. Some other choke points I'm not fond of include the UFO right after being hard to see and not having a comfortable click pattern AND randomly deciding to go backwards in the middle of the part, the cloud part halfway through having unclear hitboxes at times, the trees in the foreground of the forest part at 85% sometimes making inputs blind, and most parts with the vignette becoming frustrating because of the limited vision. It's a good idea that fits well in Lonely travel, but it's execution comes at the detriment of the player's time to react and it would be better if it was slightly transparent instead of fully opaque. When 80% of my deaths were at the hands of a few select choke points in the level, this results in the rest of the level (and playing the first 30% constantly) to become quite boring.

Despite my criticisms of the level from a gameplay standpoint, I still overall like this level. While I hate how it spawned the horrible trend of travel levels, I'm glad that Lonely travel was the level to start the push for XXL+ levels in general. Countless amazing levels that I love today would not have existed if Lonely travel was never made. There's also the chance for you to have more fun with the level than I did, so if you want to get more into XXL+ levels, I recommend trying this level.

Before I start this review I need to give some background: I lost my grandmother to dementia in October 2022. It is brutal to watch someone who you have known and loved for so long become unable to walk, confused at her surroundings, and forget who you are other than "the little one." Dementia is a very personal topic to me and I take it very seriously. If you think you are ever trying to be funny when you depict dementia in any way, I will wipe your ass with sandpaper until it is dust.

With that said, my main takeaway from SAVE AS is as follows: good intentions and a willingness to treat its subject matter with the respect and sincerity it should, but stumbles on the execution.

SAVE AS tells its story in a similar way to The Caretaker's 'Everywhere at the End of Time' (one of my top 5 favorite albums of all time), where you sink into the void of dementia over time. A lot of details are never explicitly explained, allowing you, the player/listener, to come to your own interpretations on what a certain aspect means. I love this kind of stuff when it comes to art relating to neurodegenerative diseases, and I am glad SAVE AS honored that.

The visuals are amazing and help tell the story better than any words can. The level starts with this somewhat standard rainbow-grayscale modern style, which starts to fall apart and glitch out. The glitchiness is really well done and makes the level feel unstable and deteriorating in a very natural way. The block designs progressively degrading into being an absolute mess is also really well executed. You slow down into speeds far slower than the slowest speed GD speed portals have to offer, and by the end just moving one more block forward feels like it physically hurts to do. Overall, the level nails its goal of the level slowly forgetting everything it was and what it means to be a level, but at what cost?

SAVE AS is a Geometry Dash level, and not a YouTube video or a music album. It has gameplay and is meant to be played. It's also supposedly a pretty tough level, assessed at medium demon difficulty. The gameplay? It's not good... at all... the gameplay becomes just as unstable and buggy as the design of the level, but in a way that is detrimental to the playing experience. I want to appreciate this level so much more, but this holds me back a lot from doing so. If the gameplay remained bug-free throughout the level, I'd say this is a low-end easy demon, mostly because of the level's length. When the level repeats itself and moves the gameplay you just did back in front you, there are a bunch of unique ways you can die every time, most of which are unintentional. You start to lose control of your player as the level progresses, with the player getting thrown around violently with the level. It's a cool effect, but it really sucks when this results in your wave getting placed inside a block design and dying automatically or when a block moves to a spot which bounces your ship far up/down, also sending you diving into a wall and dying. More of my time spent trying to beat the level was learning how to get around these deaths that should not be happening, while the rest of time was spent feeling bored because the level is really easy for the most part.

I'm also not big on the song that was made for this level. A few years ago, I was super obsessed with The Caretaker's work as well as a frequent member in the scene surrounding fan-made works of The Caretaker, and the song just isn't a good depiction of dementia. The way the song distorts, reverberates, and repeats upon itself does not feel natural or realistic, as well as the original melody the song makes to later destroy is just lacking in general. While tripplebarrel did eventually take it down and make a new THE NOISE EXPERIMENT that's a bit better, it wasn't THE NOISE EXPERIMENT that SAVE AS was built around. PAHC plays the hand he is dealt rather well, but I still feel the song is a disappointing and lacking depiction of dementia.

This level does a lot right in trying to depict dementia, but I'd still say it is "getting there" as opposed to perfect. Despite that, I'm still glad a level like SAVE AS exists and that PAHC was the one to make it, since it is clear he gave the subject matter the respect and intent it deserved. SAVE AS was also just an influential level in general. Almost no one was making artistic statements like these in their GD levels in 2020, but PAHC helped push for more of them to exist, which is almost a greater accomplishment than what SAVE AS set out to do in depicting dementia.