The game itself is probably more of a 3.5; somewhat similar in gameplay to Super Meat Boy, it's addictive, challenging, with a smooth and dynamic control scheme dependent largely on the shape of the map rather than the inputs, but with a kind of ugly and repetitive level design. What bumps this up all the way to 4.5, though, is through its
user map archive, which was once something of a full-fledged culture rather than a community. The output has slowed to a crawl since, but from around 2006 to 2012 there were at least a dozen new maps daily and several mapmaking and highscore competitions happening at once. In its eleven years of existence, it's spawned nearly 240,000 user-generated maps. Still now, maybe a hundred mapmakers are talked about as auteurs, and well-informed users talk about their lineage and the trends of certain years.
Beyond this game's once-respectable popularity, I think there's a couple of reasons why its online culture became what it was. The single-screen display and simple allows an emphasis on aesthetic composition, requiring users to put a lot of thought into the map in order to make it look nice, but giving the composition a frame for it to be easily examined. The base game's maps may be a little unsightly, but a lot of user maps are
~really~ ~quite~ ~lovely~. The same goes for the gameplay; because of the precise inputs and the dynamic physics engine, there's a lot of room for clever gameplay that isn't necessarily present in the base levels. (Heck, I think there's
still boundaries to push gameplay-wise, but that's just me.)
Download it, play until you're at a competent level, and then ignore the rest of the base game and just explore the map archive.
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