Rating Curve

The first of many Nine Circles levels to come. This is roughly around the same quality as Nine Circles, though I do enjoy it a bit more. This is mainly because of the predrop being shorter and less annoying overall compared to the predrop in Nine Circles. And while the wave part is slightly more inconsistent than Nine Circles’ wave, primairly with its portal placement, it still realistically has about the same consistency. Oh, and the chokeable ending is gone too, so thats definitely a plus in making this the more enjoyable Nine Circles level, and easier as well.

Visually… yea, its pretty much Nine Circles but blue. It obviously isn’t as revoultionary as what inspired this level, though I think it has better decoration than Nine Circles in a few parts, such as the ship.

If you aren’t vibing with completing Nine Circles as one of, if not, your first hard demon, perhaps you can give Jawbreaker a shot due to it being a less chokeable experience overall. Can help you get better with managing portal transitions after all, while still packing lots of wave skill.

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.

I have no idea what the general consensus regarding this level is, but if its reflective of its GDDL enjoyment rating (that being over a 9), then I have to say Crash Game is one of the most overrated insane demons in the game.

Now thats not say this is a bad level, far from it. I would generally say this is a good level overall, but far from a masterpiece, and not deserving of being the winner of the insane demon category in the 2023 awards.

Let’s talk decoration first. As expected from cherryteam, its highly polished, with an insane amount of detail in every type of design throughout, from the structures to the backgrounds. However, because it focuses so much on that, it also tends to sort of fall flat on its primary theme, that being video game themed.

In the first half of the level, outside of some neat details and references (like the orbs being the aliens from Space Invaders in one part), I really do not get a strong video game themed feeling. Two parts are just subway parts with barely any references at all (what does this have to do with video games?), and the other parts just look like generic cherryteam glow levels with some glitchy effects mixed in. Thankfully, the level improves a lot with its video game theme once you reach the drop. Everything is much more themed with video games, as the block designs have that video game like feeling, and the backgrounds are really cool as well, one of them even being Tetris and Space Invaders gameplay. And of course, the endscreen is well-made. If the first half was as creative as the second half in its aesthetics, then this level would easily have at least a 9/10 in the decoration department, but that isn’t the case.

What about the gameplay? It’s learny but gets consistent, and usually I enjoy that kind of gameplay a lot, so surely the gameplay is exceptional, right? Well, not exactly. It’s not the worst thing I ever played obviously, but far from amazing. It is true that it is learny, but gets consistent after you play it enough, which is where a large part of my gameplay score comes from. Problem is… the gameplay doesn’t having enough going on with it, which I felt also hindered its consistency a bit.

There just simply isn’t enough variety with the gameplay; Most of it is unmemorable, boiling down to just a bunch of non-ship/wave gameplay you would find in an easy demon. In fact, Crash Game in general plays like your average 2.2 easy demon where you just follow the indicators due to how much deco obstruction there is, except glorified a lot. I’m usually not a fan of this kind of learny gameplay for easy demons, and I’m definitely not a fan of it here. At least those easy demons have the excuse of being easy demons, as they can’t really be complicated with their gameplay. Crash Game has NO excuse for having this kind of gameplay in a difficulty range where creators like Loltad and Sodaz thrived in making excellent and unique learny gameplay.

This is made worse by the fact that the level went annoying with how it went with its gameplay sometimes, The part at 64%, for example, is bullshit, there is TOO much visual obstruction to see anything, that you pretty much have to remember where to even click/tap. That’s not how you make learny gameplay at all! Also the level does feel a bit unbalanced, with the first 22% taking up more attempts than I’d like to admit, though its obviously far from Necropolis level balancing.

Despite how critical I was about this level, I still think it is good and would most likely recommend it, as it definitely does has it strengths. The second half is great with its video game themeing, and the gameplay has its fair share of enjoyable parts, like the opening spider which is very satisfying to pull off, and some parts during the drop as well. But it is far from one of the best insane demons in the game. Also the fact it has a higher GDDL enjoyment than Cloud Nine is a joke.

The Meaning by VFG

It’s a Clutterfunk copy… only change? The song. Aaand the song ain’t even on Newgrounds anymore… aaand the song is made by Advy… aaand yea idk what else you want me to say lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Barely even qualifies as a “level”.

It is just a copy of Stereo Madness, with an obnoxious flashy background effect and red/white ground deco on every block for some reason, both of which make the level look much worse visually than the original, hilariously enough. And the song is Stereo Madness 2 (why?), so there’s hardly any sync at all.

The gameplay changes are extremely minimal, with there being like 1 extra spike on some jumps, and the ship sections having very, very, VERY slightly more obstacles. Riveting!

Similar to The Nightmare, this level’s iconicity is carried by the fact that it is also one of, if not, the easiest demon in the game. Chances are if you didn’t do The Nightmare as your first demon, you did this one.

The gameplay is very basic, primairly consisting of basic jumps over spikes and blocks, and also a lot of jump pads and orbs because why not. The level peaks in the ball part towards the end, where you follow the arrows to take the correct path, but not much else to say.

The decoration is very messy and has more than aged, though this is probably as good as you could get back in 1.2.

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.

Undoubtedly one of my favorite easy demons in the game. This level has an incredibly unique gameplay gimmick that manages to make blind gameplay (an objectively kind of bad gameplay) actually work!

Basically, for each part, you have to continue the pattern that the level presents to you, and you have to repeat this as the path you take gets slowly more and more invisible/obscured. This is such an awesome concept alone, and its very well executed and highly polished in this level. This type of gameplay made it feel like I was playing some sort of rhythm game like Rhythm Heaven, and I fw it heavy for that. It is also pretty well set up in the beginning, as it gives you a basic yet effective example of just jumping over spikes in time with the flashing music note, so you’ll get the general idea of what the level is all about.

I also really adore the whole old windows OS/vaporwave theme that this level aims for, such as with the gray blocks it uses to represent the windowed tabs, mouse cursors dragging the bar along, almost as if you are in some sort of video, and the module texts showing the different kinds of patterns. Many of the backgrounds are also charming, and help contribute to the vaporware theme more. I will say module 3 isn’t as strong with the OS theme as much as the other parts, but it still has themeing with the mouse cursors moving some objects. And the gameplay is still fun in that part!

And, if you’re up for the challenge, this level even offers some further replay value with its coins, where it makes each pattern entirely invisible. I myself didn’t go for them, but its a very nice thing to go for if you’d like to!

Just, in general, a really high quality easy demon, mainly thanks to its unique ginmick and aesthetic which are both done amazingly. Definitely give this a play if you have not already.

It has been a couple of months since I beaten this level, and I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about it.

I have played Acu a little bit on and off for about 4 years now, but last year was when I decided to lock in and actually try to beat it without really caring about any other levels.

First is the decoration. Despite being released almost 5 years ago, it’s aged quite well. Nothing thats groundbreaking, but still very flashy and full of life. And while the idea of a modern deco and/or joyful themed extreme demon is definitely a sleeper choice nowadays, it was actually a pretty novel concept back then, likely being the first of its kind to do both. It also could’ve very well been the most enjoyable extreme in the game when it first dropped, given how awful earlier extremes tended to be. This level more or less shown that extremes can have intriguing decoration and gameplay, instead of just being made hard for the sake of it. Speaking of which…

Let’s discuss my experience. When I was practicing the level in the editor, it was very fun! The drop gameplay was consistent and very satisfying to get down, my favorite part being the dual at 45% up to around 63%. There seemed to be almost no hiccups for me practicing, as I even made some nice progress, including 35, 63-100, and 28-70, meaning I basically had the level in 3 runs. After getting runs like these, I figured I was ready to start playing from 0.

And so, I began. And that right there, is when the cracks immediately made themselves known. Enter, the predrop. Good lord, this predrop infuriated me. It felt so much harder than the rest of the level. I really despise it when levels have frontloaded balancing, it can feel draining and hopeless trying to make any progress on them, and even when you do pass those parts, I still get very nervous afterwards, because one death means I have to sit through the frontloaded slog. This especially elevates any dumb deaths I make afterward to a newfound level of frustration.

Acu was certainly no exception to this, but it had it worse than most other frontloaded levels I played to this point, because I soon realized that the drop had some wack chokepoints that I can’t understand HOW they made it past playtesting. The chokepoints I’m specifically referring to are the waves at 27/29%, and the wave at 68%, the latter of which is quite possibly the most notorious part of the level.

While I did make solid progress on this level, the best of my attempts being 71 THREE times (srsly fuck that wave), I was raging a lot. These wave chokepoints, combined with the irritating predrop, made this level a nightmare for me to play, and I honestly lost a ton of desire to play it because of how poorly built it felt at times. And that’s what happened, I stopped playing around the first week of august last year, especially since I had to lock in for uni at the time (yes, I had uni classes over the summer 😭)

But then, a couple of days after I finished my summer semester, I wanted to lock in for a day and play the level again. When I first did, I was able to de-rust my consistency on the level, but not only that, there some other things that happened and greatly helped with my experience.

The biggest one was regarding the predrop, where I got more consistent at it, and realized its not the whole predrop thats bad, more like the whole first 10% of the level, as once I got past that mini wave in the predrop, it seemed to be smooth sailing from there, rarely dying in the rest of the predrop.

Next, I did a run of 27-100 TWICE!!! It was crazy how I did this quickly, and because I wanted to practice those waves at 27/29% even more, I decided to do some runs in the middle of the predrop. AND DID A RUN FROM 9-100%!!! My consistency was nuts at this point, so the next thing to do was play from 0 again!

And within 5 mins, while I got my fourth death at the dreaded 71%… I FLUKED THE LEVEL FROM 71%!!! I was so blown away when this happened, but of course I was also very happy and relieved. I still can’t fathom that I pulled it off, even all of these months later.

It was all essentially one roller coaster of ups and downs with this level, where I was highly consistent, but then vey frustrated, and seemed to get even more consistent in the end after a bit of a break with the level. I guess the moral of the story here is to try and let the level grow on you as you stick with it, as you can never know what kinds of consistency and crazy feats you can pull off with it. Just keep in mind that the predrop will likely take more time than the drop to get more consistent at, so be sure to practice the timings as much as possible. But yea, in conclusion, it was a very mixed experience with the level. If you can tolerate a couple of weirdly placed chokepoints, you can do this as a first extreme. Otherwise, if you can’t seem to get the chokepoints down, perhaps you should play something else more balanced. One thing though, is that you certainly can’t call this a dull experience, with anything flatout boring, and I think that’s where Acu best excels as, especially given its upbeat theme.