Rating Curve

Absolutely impeccable and unique atmosphere in this level, it’s crazy how ominous and uncanny the creator managed to make this level feel with such minimalistic details. The visuals complement the song perfectly. I never thought I would play a gd level that would make me feel legitimately creeped out without needing anything like jumpscares, and I have to give the creator massive props for that.

Now, I understand that this is definitely more of level to be watched than played, which is why this doesn’t even seem to have a gameplay score on this site yet. But the thing is, my overall score criteria is largely determined by how good the gameplay is, visuals only really influence a small part of my score. So with that said, this level’s gameplay straight up sucks!

While the gameplay does compliment the atmosphere of this level very well (which is pretty much where the 2 points in my gameplay rating entirely come from), it isn’t enjoyable to play at all. Not only is way too repetitive and slow paced to be engaging, it’s very unbalanced, as, in the second half, there are a lot of jumps that are nearly impossible to telegraph, due to the slope usage and the unpredictable nature of the song flickering the blocks, possibly making you do some other unnecessary jumps. This basically just becomes memory on when you have to jump, and it certainly wasn’t the good kind of memory.

What also baffles me is just how unoptimized the second half of this level is, it seems like it shouldn’t be laggy at all due to how minimal the decoration is, yet I was constantly getting lag spikes, and during a lot of the jumps too, which only added to my frustration. And of course, with the second half being so hard, it just makes the first half so boring and tedious to sit through each time. Lastly, this level is misrated as crap, its more of a higher end easy demon honestly.

Y’know, that I’m thinking about it, this level does feel like a creepy version of Still Life; minimalistic deco xl length with only mini cube gameplay for the entire level that is repetitive and boring, and has some annoying chokepoint halfway through the level. At least I do like this level a bit more than Still Life, mainly thanks to a strong and intriguing atmosphere, whereas Still Life looked more like any other level that attempted a theme like this.

But yea, this is definitely one of the most “watch, not play” levels in the game. The more you play it, the further its atmosphere quickly wears off, turning it into a slog to beat, so I obviously would not recommend trying that. Weird how y’all seem to have this mentality with the gauntlet contest winners and give those levels low scores mainly because of how badly/laggy they play, and this level has awful gameplay/optimization too yet everyone seems to be afraid of giving it a low score while highly praising it. Idk, seems like a double standard to me but I digress.

While I can get behind how some may enjoy this level, I really didn’t. This was a frustrating experience to beat.

The decoration is too lacking for my liking. I’m aware its obviously supposed to be simple, but its just too barren for me to actually find anything interesting in. If this level wasn’t made by Hinds or any other creator that is (or WAS in this case) well-respected, no one would give any crap about how it looks, with some probably sharing similiar thoughts as me, and it certainly wouldn’t get rated either.

The gameplay was also not very fun. Nearly all of the difficulty comes from 19-32% and the ending memory cube, making this hella unbalanced. The rest of it is really just okay at best, not really offering much I would want to play, especially in the insane demon range.

Still Life? More like Stale Fries! Yea, I don’t know about you, but this is my least favorite level in the 2.2 gauntlets so far.

The gameplay is downright awful, there are definitely ways to make mini cube gameplay well, but this level is NOT one of them. Pretty much all this gameplay consists of mini cube timings over 1 or 2 spike. That is way too reptitive for my liking, and I don’t care about any “artistic” choices for why the gameplay was made like this, its not going to make me suddenly warm up to it.

To make matters worse, about the halfway through the level is the spiraling tower part, which, while admittedly a pretty impressive effect, is also annoyingly way harder than the rest of the level. And it sort of irritates my eyes to concentrate while looking at all these pulsing pink lines. This part only served to make the level even more tedious, since I almost always had to do the first half again whenever I got this part.

Plus, I’m not particularly huge on the aesthetics here. It’s mostly just another quirky “minimalistic deco with repetitious gameplay” kind of level that is far too overdone as an attempt to be different. I do like a little bit of the artwork shown here tho, but that’s about it.

I dislike this overall, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend playing it. But you’ll have to beat it if you wanna complete the castle gauntlet smh.

Man, this was such a frustrating experience. At first, the level seemed fine enough while I memorizing it. However, the main problem is that once you have it fully down, the level becomes entirely carried by about 5 inputs (with the wave at 73% being particularly awful). This completely ruined any momentum I had with the level, turning it into a boring and tedious yet annoying snoozefest, especially with how boring the predrop is. I’m not sure if this kind of balancing was the intention or not, but even it it was, I still wouldn’t like this gameplay design at all.

As for the decoration, its okay. I like how it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it also just doesn’t have enough variance to keep me engaged.

I’m an avid memory enjoyer, but even though this seems like one of the more well-received memory levels, sorry but this level was just not it for me. You should probably go play Lost Love instead, as that level seems to be this one but actually good.