Rating Curve

This is a pretty cool level. It looks pretty simple, but simplicity can be effective. I didn't actually notice the way Yottabye was using the level background at first, but now that I'm aware, I think it looks that much cooler. I suppose it's because you're used to the background being some distant image with a parallax effect, so you don't recognize it when it doesn't move relative to the level.

As everyone else is mentioning, this level is primarily a visual experience. And to be clear, the visuals look very good. The playing experience does leave something to be desired, though. The first 25% or so plays decently well (barring the lag I got even on LDM because my gaming laptop's fursona is a potato), but the gameplay started to fall off in quality after that; some sections felt a bit empty, others felt maybe a bit slower than they should've been, and others were just really long cutscenes. Again, the visuals were very good; it's just that the gameplay generally felt kinda bland.

Most of this level is pretty decent. It looks very 2.0, but some parts do still look genuinely good, in my opinion. The deco is definitely where this level shines, though, because it starts with a 12-second cutscene (by my estimation) and has several fairly annoying choke points on top of that. The choke points themselves aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves, but they are definitely made bad by the fact that you have to wait 12 seconds minimum before you can do anything again.

This level was a joy from start to finish. Learning it was fun, and beating it was also fun. Part of it may just be that I really like the song, but I also feel like Zoroa was able to represent the intensity of the song really well. The clicksync was probably the part of the gameplay that stood out to me the most; while I wouldn't say the level is entirely built around clicksync, there's a lot of short bursts of clicksync, like that one UFO part with the slow triplets and the spider part near the end, that are just the best finger candy. (Does that term make sense? Like ear candy, but for your mouse button finger? Regardless, it's super fun and very tactfully used.)

As for the deco, it doesn't do anything outrageous, but I think it still works. Actually, I think the tone shift is handled really well; you've got bright colors in the predrop, and then the buildup starts introducing a lot more black, which I think really builds up the intensity. And while the drop also has a lot more black, it's still pretty colorful; some parts even use some of the rainbow blocks as accents, which I think is really cool, and it serves as a reminder that as intense as it is, this is still a happy level. Kinda subtle, I guess, but it works really well.

I feel like the main theme of this level w/rt gameplay is "don't get distracted". This theme starts early: the very start of the level has the camera rotating all around at angles you don't normally see it, and it gets repeated throughout the level, like the wave part which would normally have very flashy effects, and the ship part where the dual shenanigans make it hard to tell your bearing. It's a very unique idea, and I think it's super cool, and —

I wish I'd enjoyed this level more.

This level is probably perfectly fine on most of y'all's devices. Mine, though, has a petrifying fear of trigonometry, and it really doesn't seem to like the animation of the gears turning during the buildup. As such, I could not run that part at over 20 FPS — even on low detail — which severely detrimented my playing experience. For the cube part, you have to blindly learn and memorize a click pattern, which takes a great deal of trial and error, and I wouldn't even say it truly gets consistent; and the wave part is just pure RNG. If I die because I can't tell which direction my ship is facing, that's a valid death — I wouldn't've died if I'd paid better attention to that. But if I die because I can't tell where my wave is or how close it is to the walls, or because I missed an orb that I couldn't've known I was going to miss, that's just unfair. And add to that that the ship part in the fakeout is one of the harder parts of the level, and it just forms the most massive tumor of a choke point. Would it have been fine if my computer didn't lag? Probably! Which is part of why I'm frustrated — I feel like I was robbed of a better playing experience because the level was poorly optimized.

The deco is fine, and the gameplay should be fine, so I'll give it a higher rating than I might like to, but I still had a bad experience with this level.

It's a cool idea, but I don't know that it really works here. It could've made a really nice level if it were longer, but the song itself doesn't really feel like it progresses enough for that.