It's been a while, hasn't it? I spent late September/early October going through the rest of SC2020 expert, but upon reaching the heartside I got busy with other things and didn't play for a couple months. I did pick it back up a week or two ago, though, and to my surprise my skills hadn't rusted all that much! Still, the heartside seemed intimidating so I've switched to doing SJ expert maps for now. All that said, here are my takes on those long-completed SC2020 maps:
Ultra Sandwich by dahlukeh
A red-difficulty map, this one serves as an introduction to ultras - for the uninitiated, these are a technique that looks like a wavedash (in that you dash diagonally down toward the ground and jump upon landing) but with a subtly different timing that allows you to apply a multiplier to your forward momentum. If you've ever seen a video of impossibly fast-looking Celeste gameplay, chances are it involved a bunch of ultras. This level, being a gentler initiation into the arcane controller rites that turn Madeline into a transsexual railgun, doesn't get too unreasonably fast and generally has only one ultra per screen. The rest of the mechanics on offer are a somewhat unfocused grab bag of other stuff - there are kevins, moving platforms, collapsing blocks, feathers, a bumper, and the rising/falling fire/ice mechanic from core - and wait, holy shit, that's why it's called ultra sandwich! But that general lack of focus holds it back, and combined with its setting - just the core, but with music from farewell - it was a largely unmemorable level overall.
Blank Dreams by Zerex
This one is short and absolutely gorgeous, with a tight focus on precise dream block tech, particularly dream hypers. The gameplay is all familiar at this point, after getting some early practice in Thunder Temple and Olden Tower Ruins, but this is easily my favorite of the three because of its aesthetic - it's an ascent through a crystalline dream palace lit by an aurora, and Marshall H's soaring piano accompaniment makes it feel like you're flying in a dream, which is exactly what the mechanics are having you do! Honestly, this would probably be in my top three or four Expert maps for its music alone.
Trenches of Jellies by Mün
True to its name, this level is a series of jellyfish-juggling exercises, often with 2-3 of the floaty little bastards bouncing around at any given time. You have to navigate around spikes and electricity, all while throwing or precisely dropping jellies to hit a series of switches that allow you to access the exit. It's quite solid as a mechanical exercise, and Marshall H's background music is lovely, but the visual clutter on every screen made it difficult to read at times. It's been a running issue with Mün's levels, actually - too much bright shit on screen at one time.
Ligament by Kube
Imagine a cursed Celeste map that kills you seven days after you play it. Congratulations, that's Ligament. Mechanically it's mostly jellyfish tech alongside bubbles and water, both of which interact with jellyfish in counterintuitive ways, all within a claustrophobic spike-labyrinth - and like, so many levels can be described as a spike-labyrinth, but generally in those you can tell what path the spikes are funneling you into. Ligament, though? It's readable, sure, but the hazards are placed in a way that feels subtly wrong in a way I can't fully articulate. Zachary Talis's background music is this weird ambient drone that made me feel weirdly tense, like I was expecting a jumpscare or something? It's a banger map, is what I'm saying. You should go play it so Sadako will spare my life.
High Voltage by RadleyMcTuneston
This one's one of the easier levels in the lobby, focusing on precise traffic block movement. Often you're asked to quickly interact with a block that's returning to its starting location, which gives the level as a whole an enjoyable sense of constant time pressure. Visually it's a city map with some custom assets to make it look more like one of those high-rise electrical towers. AarroHTL's music didn't make a huge impression on me, though that could be partially because this level didn't take me terribly long.
Cycle Madness by DeathKontrol
UGH. I resent that this map is as genuinely well-designed as it is. It's just the huge mess section of the base game's third chapter, but it's a version from a nightmare mirror dimension in which Maddy Thorson is a merciless sadist. It's full of kaizo bullshit rooms filled with eye-crossingly huge numbers of moving hazards. It's all very thoughtfully laid out, though, and has a sort of modular difficulty system - strawberries are placed at the beginning of branching paths, but they're trapped in a pile of junk that you need to reach the end of the path to clean up. This forces you to backtrack through each of them to get the strawberries, but with even fewer safe places to stand and climb. One of the paths is entirely optional, I think, and would have made the entire level easier if I were not a creature of hubristic pride, honor-bound to collect every strawberry in one go.
Electric Exuberance by CANADIAN
By sheer chance, I picked the best map in the lobby to end on. God damn this one was great. Its gimmick centers around rhythm blocks - the multicolored ones that appear or disappear in time with the music - but with a very long, very slow tempo that varies arbitrarily from screen to screen and doesn't correspond to any musical cue. Blocks of a single color will make up a single long chunk of a screen, and there is an omnipresent sense that if you don't move quickly then the ground will disappear under your feet and leave you plummeting to your death. It is so much more focused on ultras than the map with the word ultra in its title, and it lets you really feel the speed you're building. It's garishly colorful without being overstimulating, and Thegur90's driving background track blends perfectly with the gameplay and visuals.
Anyway idk how many people are even reading these, but I've been enjoying writing little half-assed letterboxd reviews for my special interest. Hopefully it won't be too terribly long before my next installment!