Rating Curve

Honestly, I thought I would hate everything about this level. It had a really unbalanced pre-drop, the drop itself was way too difficult for me at the time and the whole level just kinda felt like one big chokepoint. Except the level is FIRE.

I'll admit I'm not a fan of the predrop, the ship was really annoying and some clicks felt deceivingly hard. It was fun to learn, but not as fun to play. From the drop onwards though it's just pure PEAK. The ship to me is a really hit-or-miss gamemode, and this level fucking hit. This is the most fun I have had with ship gameplay ever as far as I'm concerned. Call it flowslop or syncslop or anything you fucking want, if a level is fun it is fun, everything fits so well together and the song only makes it better. To be fair I did only die twice at it before beating it which certainly helped the experience but still.

The decoration is nothing groundbreaking, it's just meant to be a little silly and spooky for Halloween and it does that well imo. You don't really need much more than that in a level.

It was my first extreme demon, so maybe I'm a little biased, but I feel like it's overhated (at least on this site). I have seen the criticism that this is a soulless remake of Reanimation that completely ruins everything it went for, but like... it's not a remake??? No bossfight at the end, and the gameplay is not similar in most parts with only a few nods to Reanimation (namely the cube pink orb part, the dual, the UFO pink orb part and the symbol being put together near the end).

The decoration definitely is inconsistent. Some parts I don't really care for like at the beginning, but from 51% to the end shit starts to look exquisite (idk who made the part at 80% but it is pure FIRE, plus the transition before it looked so good that it was what made me want to beat it in the first place). It does its best with the hell theming and, even if I don't really care for it more often than not, it looks great to me.

The gameplay is where it starts to get bad. This is a mega-collab so of course I should've expected it, but GOD some parts are awful. I'll get the good parts out of the way first: everything from 51% is completely fine, it's a noticeable dip in difficulty compared to what was prior but I like that it gives you a small break before throwing you into the deep end again. The drop I think was really well done, not only is the gameplay fun it also complements the song and theme really well with very chaotic and vertical gameplay. Now the elephant in the room: the part from 30-40 is pure and utter dogshit (at least gameplay wise). You start with 4 awkward and unsynced clicks which you don't get consistent at until you're almost done with the level, then you have the dual UFO with two really awkward mini-wave clicks into a BLIND SPIDER CLICK (you can't even sight-read it because the damn portal is TRANSPARENT) that doesn't even work half the time, then another really awkward wave followed by the anti-christ itself, I don't even know how to describe the dual spider, you really do just have to play it to understand. Then a slope click that doesn't work half the time followed by a ship where you have to straight fly without seeing anything (and if you do it wrong you just die to a sawblade later because fuck you).

I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say this part might have been really screwed over by 2.2 physics, but most of it is just badly designed, it made my experience with the level miserable.