Levelhead

Levelhead is the latest from Butterscotch Shenanigans, a developer that have been following for some years now. I have enjoyed all of their games that I tried and Levelhead is certainly their most refined and ambitious game so far. This has been instantly compared to Super Mario Maker, and rightfully since it allows you to create your own platforming levels to share with other players of the game.

I haven't played Mario Maker myself so I can't really compare it, but I don't think that is totally my type of game. Personally I am not much into creating (and the creator here is pretty good), so that portion of the game doesn't interest me much. As you complete others levels you get some bucks that you can spend to market your own levels so that they get higher in the discover queue. That's cool and all, but since I have no intention to make my own levels, the motivation just isn't there for me to complete all the levels.

The game is a pretty frantic 2D platformer. The devs have created 90+ levels of their own in the training module, and after the first 20 or so the game becomes extremely hard and reminds me of Celeste a lot. That type of platformer where you have to dodge everything and time everything perfectly. Thankfully it works a lot on trial and error with lots of checkpoints, but it's also incredible frustrating to restart all over again. The game has leaderboards for all the created levels and it definitely has a competitive edge for that, but yeah players are infinitely better than me.

This game is probably incredible, but I just don't feel that I'm the target audience for it. I'm sure that people that adore Celeste (which I liked, but not to the point of some others) will be totally into this, and also those who like to create their own levels. Really well done and polished game, it deserves all the props and exposure that it can get but I can't say I was completely thrilled with it since I feel I'm missing half the game without being into level creation.