• they/she

31 • lovely critter pile
💜 @tawnuskgrevy 💜
fighting games and other stuff I like.
sergal, deer, zoroark, crow, or synth, depending on who asks.


I've been having a lot of fun with the strawberry jam modpack the last month or two but good lord it sometimes feels like there is too fuckin much to do because of how many different levels they stuffed into it.

Here's me being a doofus:

Longer-ish form thoughts under here.


[As a preface, this is obviously not written to disrespect the creators and organizers of this project, these are just my thoughts after futzing around for 100 hours]

Strawberry Jam, I think, suffers from either poor organization or just loss of scope? Hard to put into words. It feels like there is so much stuff to do with the intent of there just being stuff to do so they can advertise funny numbers (Over 100+ new levels!, etc. etc.). But the general idea is that there are 5 lobbies worth of levels, roughly organized by skill needed to clear, with roughly 20-30 levels apiece. If you fully completed the original Celeste (up through Ch. 9), you could probably beat the first two lobbies worth of levels with a bit of derusting.

Instead of the pack as a whole feeling tightly focused on delivering unique experiences, there's a lot of what feels like "filler" where they made something that feels like a Celeste level, but doesn't have any of the investment or impact of one because the experience of it is so smoothed out that it doesn't leave any impression on my mind.

Level go in > no rough corners or edges to make me remember it > level go out

Describes probably half of these levels I've played so far? I honestly could not tell you what stood out to me about a lot of these other than maybe the gimmick they came up with, which are also sometimes coming in underdeveloped or underutilized, imo.

You'd almost be free to ignore anything that doesn't catch your interest after 2 or 3 screens, but the one overarching level in each lobby, called Heartsides, are only accessible after completing every other level in the lobby. Heartsides are large, long architected levels where each level in the lobby contributes a screen as a kind of "summary" of what it represents. (For example, if a lobby has 20 levels, the Heartside is going to have 20 screens)

I don't think I really have a "conclusion" because this isn't a fuckin formal essay, I'm just writing out thoughts on a project that seemed interesting to me now that I've put a fair bit of time into it.

I think I enjoyed my time in the 2020 Spring Community collab (a different mod also designed to create new levels organized into lobbies by difficulty) more.


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