Rating Curve

a testament to the following things

1) despite 1.9 as an era lasting 9 months we still cling to the childlike wonder it brought us a decade ago

2) being early to something can often carry more cultural weight than being great at something

3) a perceived theme can and should be more than just priming your color channels and copy-pasting in some assets

4) red level no send

the embodiment of my once-a-year impulse to listen to Stars of the Lid - for most of your waking hours it'll feel like boring repetitive nonsense and then you'll find yourself in a weird pocket of calm where everything makes infinitely more sense in the stillness of your mind

beating this before it got rated is one of those shitty brownie points I will take to the grave

ultimately faint praise for arguably one of the worst offenders of its respective gauntlet contest, but I love how texture is used here. most levels, including many space gauntlet winners, end up looking mushy or amateurish - not so here. that kind of cascading pulsar at 0:38 really captures not just the look, but the feel, of a supernova going off, and the use of color and grain at 0:58 is, on a technical level, great. that to me is worth the price of admission. if we're gonna be in the age of releases intentionally designed to be watched on Youtube rather than played in-game then you may as well take it all the way

more broadly, a masterclass in how technical ability does not translate to aesthetic prowess. it's this game's equivalent of listening to technical death metal

for a game with the word "Geometry" quite literally within the title, toying with geometry in the editor is one of the most tedious and time-consuming efforts imaginable.

you wanna make a square? we got a billion of those. you wanna make a circle? plenty of those to go around. you wanna make a triangle? it'll look a bit wonky sometimes but it's got good heart.

then we get to the tough stuff... you wanna make a pentagon? that's gonna be 10x the effort. how about a polygon with an irregular set of angles and side-lengths? have fun wasting an hour to get it right. you wanna make any sort of interesting curve? you might as well chop your fingers off. you want a bezier curve that responds to updating the foci? just fucking uninstall

it's precisely that inertia associated with developing anything past blocky structures and basic polygons that makes underworld such a landmark level. yeah it doesn't really get going until about the halfway point but it doesn't matter when you have two sections that utterly mesmerize in how they defy not only expectations for what a level can look like, but the very limitations of the editor every creator has come to submissively internalize. someday I believe we'll get more creators actually prioritizing strange geometries over defaulting on squares and circles

PS a bezier curve feature is not that hard to implement, nor is a point-by-point polygon object. if 2.2 was nothing but the scale trigger and these two features I'm certain it would've still triggered a massive sea change

playing this in 2019 was genuinely the last time I had fun playing levels within the game

I think I've always had an envy for just how easy this level embodies those outsider-artist sensibilities - there's nothing quite like it in the purview of this game. it's like the lurid dreams of someone born in 1991 who grew up on a media diet of early PBS Kids and PS1 games. that being said, any sort of description of its coolness would be remiss not to end it with "...in the context of geometry dash"

boredom is an emotion worth exploring

have always had some level of reverence for any project in this game that claims to care about the outside world and then actually follows through, but this is basically "what if we did The Disintegration Loops but it's Geometry Dash" without a punchline

in a marketplace saturated with a neverending barrage of bright n shiny releases, each desperately cloying for your attention span with visual language about as subtle as your average U2 concert, it was nothing less than a triumph to come up with something this keenly minimalistic and still resonate through to the other side. every object feels like it's there for a very good reason. tried mimicking this for months in scrapped tests and always came up short on flash's machine-precise aesthetic lens

also, this level introduced me to Floating Points, who I have since seen in concert. an incredible show to boot