Squarsh

squarsh is a Make a Good Level X3 contest entry, submitted by deice. The player is automatically filtered to Mario at the start.

Sturg
A very creative concept, but wow it's unfortunate how butchered its execution is. I think my first issue is how long each aspect of the gimmick takes. There are timer blocks that appear and won't disappear until a set amount of time, but, they sometimes block the path to the reset door. So, if you mess up immediately, you gotta wait the whole cycle before you can use the pretty borked vanilla method of resetting by reloading the level each time. It's incredibly easy to mess up most, if not, all of these challenges, including the very first one, where the level traps you for waiting too long to react to the concept. It actually would've been faster to allow the player to kill themselves somehow, rather than having wait for these timed blocks to finish their thing and then head back to the reset door.

Next, the level asks a TON from the player and expects them to learn and solve each challenge in one life. I'm shocked there's no midpoint here, let alone there being one right before every puzzle. The later challenges get absolutely *brutal*, and can take up a crazy amount of time depending on how many resets are needed.

If it were the resets by themself, providing a somewhat efficient flow of tackling each problem, I would've been totally fine albeit annoyed. YET, it is -incredibly- easy to die. There are normal enemies placed through the entire level, and there are sections between challenges that aren't exactly a piece of cake. In the last two setups, you added a venus fire trap into the mix. This was, by far, the absolute worst decision the level makes. They throw fireballs at you, so you have to dodge them. But you also have to take care of your directional inputs, due to the gimmick itself. And with the level giving you terribly cramped or hard to manuever areas of space to work with, you're forced to choose between the following: either you take the hit from the fireball, screw up the gimmick and be forced to reset, or both. Yet, because no power-ups are accessible from these resets, it is incredibly risky to take damage. The paths that the planthead has to travel are also stupidly long, so you have to dodge *at least* three fireballs successfully. This isn't even the last obstacle, as there's a pretty annoying Cheep-Cheep jump that needs to be learned right after this with a bit of manuevering to follow. With no midpoint, you're sent all the way back, and you get to enjoy literal minutes of resets and waiting before you can get back to where you were.

There just didn't need to be enemies with how much space and attention is needed for the gimmick. It gets in the way of the concept, and makes the level terribly frustrating with how much time it wastes. I would have scored this *much* higher if the enemies didn't overlap with the gimmick, and it's a shame that the level's in the shape that it is.

Zatsupachi
It is an interesting concept but the execution is just bad. The obstacles placed starting on the fourth iteration contradict the nature of the gimmick, though having an element that can kill you(let alone something that can chuck aimed projectiles) while you are threading the needle to save the Hoopster from purple death, it falters even more when you enter the reset door-- it usually has a free shot at you as you unless you duck out of the way as soon as you regain control. The icing on the cake? There are zero checkpoints-- you can die at any point in this level and it will send you way back at the start, that last iteration of the gimmick is plain mean.

Rameau's Nephew
Goes from "quirky" to "obscene" rather quickly. The "save the Hoopster with a vine" puzzles are a fun idea, though the fourth variant rather quickly throws us off a cliff. This setup would be kind of tricky on its own, but combining it with a *very* annoyingly positioned Venus Fire Trap makes it exasperating, and what's more, dying has the price of forcing you to repeat the previous three setups again. The final challenge feels slightly less infuriating due to being less confined, but is no less difficult, again forcing you to simultaneously perform a crosspad-input-based vine puzzle while dodging dangerous things, with an even higher price of failure. On the whole, the final two variants feel more like a hyper-challenge for someone who already has the muscle memory for the vine puzzles thoroughly baked in to their muscley memory hole than a natural progression from the first few setups.

+ Quirky idea and atmosphere

- Goes abruptly and completely off the deep end with the last two variants.

Other: I prefer to interpret the title not as a portmanteau of "square" and "marsh", but rather as an exclamation of surprise by an inebriated Goofy.

Author's notes
location: marsh

adjective: square

npc: hoopster

bonus: foo