Rating Curve

this score isn't a joke, i meant what i said on twitter and i'm sticking to it

there's just something i find intriguing about the concept of this level and the way it just throws ideas together with no rhyme or reason; usually for a lot of conventional levels that disjointedness would be a serious downside, but here it kind of helps the vibes immensely. as the name implies, it's just a bunch of tests of random gimmicks and other odds-and-ends and while i think the original intent was to be literally just an ideas test with no deeper meaning behind it, it also gives me the vibes of a dev room, something that wasn't meant to be seen and is just kind of hidden outside the bounds of the game. i hear the complaints of the level being object spam or reminiscent of a recent tab level but i honestly feel like that's a pretty disingenuous complaint to make, there's clearly some amount of care being put into how the objects are used here (some objects are purposed as part of a tileset, for example, and i of course can't forget the spider section that scrolls through a bunch of different decoration blocks in a manner similar to minecraft's debug mode) and the level is really creative at times with the various gimmicks it brings forward. some highlights for me are the mechanic with clicking to make a platform complete a circuit and turn on the lights (complete with a fully tangible bg trigger!) and the art gallery, with the latter having this really cool setup of stumbling upon a little cabin surrounded by trees and having to actually physically enter it with the ball. there's a lot of moments like this to be had and i can't help but appreciate the unabashedly raw and unpolished look the whole project has.

whether intentional or not, test tube is a very avant-garde expression of creativity by the standards of gd, and that makes it stand out in my mind more than most other levels i can think of.