Rating Curve

I had a pleasant time playing through this level! This is another one of those levels that basks in simplicity and it doesn't try to be overly impressive visually or gameplay-wise because it doesn't need to. I enjoyed how the level uses its runtime to try out a variety of different designs but doesn't switch them up so much to the point it feels overwhelming. The level is also very good at maintaining a calm, relaxing atmosphere and it never feels stressful despite its great length.

The only thing I don't like about the level is how it can be a bit boring to replay because of how easy it is and how it doesn't really have a strong progression in the way Scenery does. 9Lives is one of those levels where you need to be really into the level in order to enjoy it, otherwise you might get very bored and the level could read as having a lot of filler. Despite that, I would still recommend the level for anyone looking for a nice, easy XXXL experience! Despite its 8* rating, I was able to sightread it very comfortably and the raw difficulty never really gets harder than 6*.

This is one of the most reviewed and highest rated levels on the site AND it's also a level sometimes brought up in conversations surrounding the "greatest level of all time." I think it's a fantastic level deserving of a lot of its praise, but I don't quite feel the same conviction regarding this level's gameplay.

I'll briefly talk about the visuals and progression in this level since they are without a doubt revolutionary and super ahead of its time, but I mostly don't have anything to add to the discourse that hasn't been said already. I love the way Lit Fuse starts out super lethargic, quiet, and muted with its colors to match its song slowly fading in. The next two parts with a lot more color but still being slow yet becoming more tense leading up to the drop are also amazing. The release of energy at the drop is unlike anything else that was being released at the time and is still mind-blowing considering the fact this was made almost 10 years ago. It's with all of these things combined that make Lit Fuse a precursor to what people began to do with song representation years after, and for that it deserves to held with such high critical acclaim.

So why am I only giving this a 7? Well, something else this level did that no other level has before was that this is the only level I've ever beaten that has given me physical pain. Something to keep in mind is that I beat Lit Fuse as a new hardest almost exactly a year ago and I grinded it out in just 4 days, but on each of those days I poured at least an hour and a half into it each day.

There isn't anything to note in the first section, it's mostly fine though it can get a bit boring. Instead, my first problem with how this level plays comes going into the first ship. It's another ship that is mostly fine, just a bit boring to have to play a lot of. What I don't like is just how jarring the shift in brightness is going into this ship. After playing the dark first cube for a while, getting to the ship is like being flashbanged. In fact, this ship maintains its high brightness and saturation for so long that one night while I was playing the level, I closed my eyes for a bit and I was still able to see the ship part. It's maybe a bad sign if the ship gets burned into my eyes...

On a different note, let me tell you about how the dual part is the bane of my fucking existence. The entire time I was playing Lit Fuse, I was never able to get this part consistently. The ship really sucks to control since it feels a lot heavier when in dual gravity, and the UFO constantly needed spamming to get through. So, I ended up having to try different methods of spamming and praying to get through the dual. Practicing the dual and trying different things may have sounded like a good idea, but what I ended up doing was sending my hand into complete pain from constantly spamming as best I could. At this time that I was grinding Lit Fuse, I was spending my mornings and afternoons volunteering at a summer camp at my local art museum so I was always experiencing the pain from playing this level trying to do basic tasks, all the way down to just trying to open doors. By late day 3 or early day 4, I started to feel like this was becoming too much on my hand so I had to switch to using my left hand for the spam in the dual. One silver lining to this dual was that the second half was a fair bit easier because the wave is not subject to same bullshit gravity the ship is while in the dual, but that still didn't stop this part of the level from feeling like a massive bottleneck where I would have so many attempts get to this dual in one session, but only a single digit amount get to the drop afterwards.

After getting through that dual spam from hell, the drop is quite manageable by comparison. In fact, I'd say it's my favorite part gameplay-wise. While it is meant to be the most climactic part of the level, it's the 2nd easiest part behind the beginning. I never really struggled with anything in this part of the level, the only real problem I have with the gameplay here is that some of the transitions are rough, especially in the second half where you're going into a gamemode portal on the ceiling or ground and you can't really see what comes next very well. These were the roots of some unfortunate deaths (especially 95% twice), but it never hurt truly as much as the dual before it because I felt like I had more control over my cube at this part.

Despite this, would I recommend Lit Fuse as an entry-level insane demon? Yes. I know a good amount of people who still really enjoyed Lit Fuse and there is definitely a possibility for a new player trying to get into insane demons to have a better time with this level than I did. These issues I have in the gameplay aren't overwhelming enough to get in the way of me celebrating this level for what it is and the impact it had.

I wanted to do a review of this level since I also did a review of ascending by skywalker14, another hard demon of similar length. ascending managed to work despite its short length because it was able to pull off feeling too short in just the right way, yet tower descent does something even more impressive despite being shorter: it feels like a complete experience that isn't too long or too short. This is even more surprising when you consider the fact that ascending has a much more noticeable progression than this level.

The fact that this levels feels like a complete experience in just 25 seconds seems like something that defies logic, yet tower descent's trick is simple: it's all action, no filler. You're thrown directly into a fast-paced, rainbow, breakcore frenzy. In fact, the way this level starts is a particularly strong moment of impact because the player falls through and shatters the gray ground that is on the ceiling and is accompanied with rainbow beams of light. I can't think of any other level that opens in such a confusing way that also sets the tone for the rest of the level perfectly. While the level is a colorful frenzy the entire time, tower descent stays fresh by having gameplay which can be quantified into distinct segments that play unique from each other. My favorite is the last one, which while it is almost completely free difficulty-wise, it feels so satisfying after having to concentrate so intensely for the rest of the level and you can just zoom to the bottom with dash orbs in sync with drum rolls in the song. It's an ending that still keeps up the manic energy the rest of the level had, but it makes the player feel relieved after completing such a short but brutal level.

The one thing I'm really not a fan of about this level is the first half, which is also where a lot of this level's difficulty comes from. This half of the level consists of a long string of various orbs you rapidly descend through. This part is so ridiculously learny and somewhat inconsistent that I started to get tired of it. Almost all of these inputs are blind, too, so this half of the level could be considered a memory part depending on who you ask. I understand that this is meant to be a short burst of difficulty similar to a challenge level, but I still think too much of the difficulty is concentrated here. I only had a handful of deaths past the first half and my really high attempt count got inflated just by trying to figure out the click pattern here. After I had learned the level enough to the point where I was comfortable trying normal mode, someone told me that all of the orbs you are supposed to touch in the first half have circles around them. That is a way of indicating what orbs you're supposed to hit, but the fact that I found out that late tells me they're way too subtle of an indication.

Despite this issue I outlined, I would still recommend tower descent if this type of gameplay I described sounds good to you. I know this kind of ultra-learny and unbalanced gameplay is up some people's alleys, but it definitely isn't mine. To enjoy tower descent, you need to willing to accept that you're likely going to spend most of your time learning the first half. Other than that, it's a great lower-end hard demon. Though, like ascending, I wouldn't recommend this to a player trying to get into hard demons due to its raw difficulty.

This is a very beautiful level, but it's not quite to the point where I can consider it "amazing" or a masterpiece.

The level starts with a farm location and some mountains. I don't really have a whole lot to say about this part, it's not the best part of the level nor the worst, but it is fitting with its slow pacing and its desaturated colors to tonally match the level's song. Considering the song (and the level) are about dying, I think this part works as a sort of retrospection on life itself.

The part of the level that really stands out to me (and what mostly carries my rating) is the second part of the level with the stars and constellations. This part of the level took the wind out of me. I'm not very well-versed with Radiohead, but I have heard Motion Picture Soundtrack before playing this level. I still was unprepared for how beautifully gecko & Starky represented it. During the moment of silence while the mountains disappear off-screen and the star background fades in, you have an idea what's coming, but it still couldn't prepare me for the constellation backgrounds and lines going crazy with the harp. It's a truly spectacular section of the level and I still get chills from it.

After this part of the level, MPS makes a creative choice that, while I highly respect and see the intent, it's ultimately a decision that I feel brings down the level much more than if the level just ended after the constellation part. On the album Kid A, Motion Picture Soundtrack is listed as the final track but there is a secret, untitled song after that that starts to play after a full minute of silence, and the secret track itself is just a short ambient piece. I think something like this is great in the context of being on the Kid A album, but I feel it doesn't have a place at the end of a standalone GD level, especially when it's being thrusted upon a bunch of GD players who might be unfamiliar with Radiohead or Kid A and will be left confused at this huge gap of emptiness and the ending. I didn't feel the representation of the secret song was up to the caliber that the constellation part was, so this choice to stretch out the level to cover this extra part of the song did not feel worth it.

I should also mention the gameplay here. This is an XXL level that is only rated 3*, which may seem kinda odd at first, but it makes sense when you consider it more of something to be watched instead of played. All of the points were put on song representation and design to the point where the gameplay is very lacking. For the first half, it is a lot of slow-speed ship gameplay with a lot of open space for the player to fly around however they wish. In the second half, there is literally no gameplay. It is completely automatic for slightly more than half of a 5-minute long level, which is especially not helped by a sizeable chunk of this automatic part being just a black screen and silence. A common complaint about this level is that it is very boring to play as well as "top 5 levels to fall asleep to," and I can see where those people are coming from with that.

I'll see you in the next life.

I like this level, but I wish I could love it.

I had enjoyed DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's album "Charmed" for a bit up until I found this level, so I was a bit dismayed that the way I learned about this level's existence was in the trivia tab of either the Hypnotic Travel or TLWH GD Fan Wiki pages, don't remember which. An almost 15-minute long DJ Sabrina level was what I didn't know I always wanted, how did this fly under the radar for me?

I did a practice run and ended up beating the level on only my 2nd attempt in normal mode. I saw why this level wasn't as hugely talked about and why it probably only got a feature - the gameplay. While it does occasionally change up with ship parts or robot parts, Charmed Life spends most of its runtime entirely in the cube gamemode, doing basic jumps over spikes and hitting orbs, sometimes also pads. I understand how unfriendly the GD editor can get the longer you try to build your level, as well as that the editor ends at roughly the point the level ends, but I still feel like more could've been done to make the gameplay more enticing, even just some usage of gamemodes other than cube, ship, or robot. In this regard, Charmed Life is more meant to be watched instead of played since there just isn't much meat to the gameplay, and playing the level in-game isn't too different of an experience from watching a YouTube upload of the level.

The design of the level and the song representation is much more where this level shines, and it really does shine. Charmed Life is the longest and the 2nd to last track on Charmed, an over 3-hour behemoth of an album that is a rewarding and euphoric listen. This is a sense of finality to the song, and it is still energetic while sounding peaceful and even a bit retrospective. Charmed Life (the level) does its song great justice. The runtime of the level is spent traversing through colorful landscapes that include, nature, urbanism, outer space, and the places in-between. Under normal circumstances, I would be one to criticize the level for a lack of cohesion like I do with travel levels but I feel that's not the case here as all of the different sceneries go hand-in-hand with the song, they transition into each other very nicely (although sometimes they don't), and they also all just look nice in general. It's great that this level is able to have consistently great designs throughout. Sometimes, the lack of intuitive gameplay and the slow speed throughout (which is probably more caused from technical limitations) even helps the design and progression shine because, even while playing, you are able to comfortably take in all the environments.

The last few minutes of the level have me split, however. The song is building up for its final high and every sample we have heard up until this point reappears for the finale. In some regards, the level replicates this well too as every landscape we have seen thus far reappears for some time in sync with the music. All of the parts transition into each other with a white flash, and while this happens constantly, the level retains readability and clarity because the next bit of gameplay right after what you just did/are currently doing lines up with what comes next. What I am not a fan of in this part is the execution of the concept, as I feel it could have been done much better. Charmed Life doesn't just reuse the designs of a previous part of the level, it straight up just moves those parts of the levels directly to where they need to be for this part of the level. While I understand why this was done, to save objects, the gameplay in each individual segment is unchanged and the result of so many parts loading and unloading in quick succession is a lot of lag. For a level of almost 15 minutes in length, 222k objects is great, but this method of saving objects causes lots of lag anyways and I think (and I could be wrong about this) it may have just been less laggy and more interesting to create new parts of the level and gameplay for these parts.

Despite these criticisms, I still wish this level would get more attention, as it does a lot right. The modernistic, lively designs and the brilliant song representation deserve more recognition. I still have faith this level can be recognized more in the future.