Well, I've shaken off the rust from not playing Celeste for a few months, while uhhhh also getting over having covid. Gotta say, I cannot recommend getting your humours unbalanced that severely. But enough about the grotesque policy failures of the Biden administration, let's talk about the Strawberry Jam Expert lobby!

Flying Battery by AliceQuasar

For those of you who didn't grow up with a Sega Genesis in your home, this level's name and aesthetic are a reference to the level of the same name from Sonic & Knuckles, and it nails the vibe of that stage perfectly despite, y'know, being in a completely different engine with wildly different mechanics. I do admire the restraint it must have taken to not use a remix of the S&K Flying Battery theme as background music, though. This one has you carrying batteries (get it? do you get it???) through various sawblade deathtraps and using them to unlock gates, utilizing some tricky Theo tech and cornerboosts along the way. It felt more difficult than most of the other green Expert maps, but I suspect that's entirely because it's the first one I played in months.

Hydroshock by Jackal

Maybe this one was on the easier side, maybe Flying Battery just warmed me up, but I blazed through this level. It's set in a coral reef, with these square bumpers scattered around that relocate when you hit them and don't wobble slightly in place like normal bumpers. Something common to a lot of SJ Expert maps that I appreciate is that they're not shy about throwing in the occasional ultra, unlike SC2020 where they were restricted to two maps out of... what, fifteen? The music in this one is credited to Spike Chunsoft, but I'm not sure what game it was pulled from.

Meaningless Contraptions by PowerAV

I struggled a bit with this one, but I suspect I was just a little rusty on pufferfish tech. Mechanically this level's really tightly focused in a way I love to see (and tbh have come to expect from Strawberry Jam at this point), and it's all about them fish. It also introduces pufferfish jars, which are carried like Theo and explode when thrown into orange fields. This generally forces a series of inputs like: throw jar -> dash toward jar before it explodes -> quickly hold the opposite direction to get the full boost from the explosion - and all this has to be performed quite quickly, which feels great to pull off. Wangled Teb's background music adds to the mad sciencey vibe of the gameplay and decor, tying everything together nicely.

The Core Problem by Banana 23

This level was both an absolute blast and extremely validating to my project of playing the 2020 Spring Collab and Strawberry Jam back to back. It feels like a callback to the weirdly numerous and often bland core levels from SC2020, but it's interesting and inspired in a way those weren't. It uses the core fire/ice mechanics as well as the lack of dash refreshes when you touch the ground, but the level is filled with bubbles which do give your dash back. And the bubbles aren't arbitrary inclusions, they're integrated into the theme - they switch between blue bubbles that give a short boost when it's cold to red ones that travel until you dash out of them or they hit a wall when it's hot! This feels absolutely great in practice, and lava/ice walls shifting the level layout makes every screen feel dynamic. It's also the first level to prominently feature corner boosts, which are a little awkward but started to feel natural fairly quickly. Alisticious's chiptuney music gave the level a SNES rpg dungeon feel, which was oddly fitting?

Subway Neon by Nyan

This map is all about traffic blocks with unusual, curved paths and using them to your advantage. True to the name, it's a brightly-colored neon void, but it avoids being so garishly bright as to be unreadable. The decoration takes me back to the various theme park/casino levels from early Sonic games - it's a really charming aesthetic! The mechanical gimmick doesn't vary all that much, but it's a short enough level that nothing really overstays its welcome.

Overgrown Linn by Flamecrafter113

What a neat, weird level! This one makes every surface... bouncy, kinda? You can dash into surfaces and rebound off them, a bit like the blocks in SC2020's New Jank City, which also gives hypers a fair bit of extra height. This applies to dream hypers, too, and makes the decision between doing a super or a hyper feel very different. Despite the jank inherent in the core mechanic, the level feels entirely fair and never stops being readable. It's also lovingly decorated, with a lush jungle aesthetic that is incredibly bright and colorful without feeling like it's going to strain my eyes like some of Mun's levels in SC2020 did. Good times!

System.InvalidMapException by Skunkynator

As you can probably guess from the name, this map has a glitchy aesthetic, and could be seen as a spiritual successor to Major Malfunction from the Spring Collab. It adds these hot pink wall and floor sections that teleport between two locations in a screen, taking you along with them if you're touching them. It's disorienting and thematically on point, no notes there. My issue with the map as a whole is that while it tries to look garishly fucked up and generally succeeds, it's always clear that this is a meticulously designed level - it never really gets harder to read, and it doesn't have the full-screen visual glitches that Major Malfunction did. And on the one hand, that makes it more fun to play, but on the other, it makes it not cohere quite as well with its overall theme. Unironically, this map should be uglier and worse in order to be more memorable, and I will die on this hill.

Golden Alleyway by RedBoule

Welp, this was by far the hardest green Expert map. It's also by far the biggest mechanical departure from the norm - it's full of gates that you can toggle between open and closed by pressing the grab button. Thing is, you still need to press grab for other things, like, y'know, grabbing onto walls. It felt like flexing a muscle I've never used before, equal parts interesting and frustrating. The process of getting used to the new input makes the difficulty somewhat more frontloaded than most maps, compounded by the last few rooms involving lots of feathering, which I felt made it much easier to manage gates. Aklast did a great job with the chill, ethereal piano track in the background.

Madeline: The Bubble by Vina

The first yellow map of the bunch is a fucking banger! It's set in a maze of brambles in the deep woods, and throughout each screen there are sparkling fields that, when touched, cause a translucent bubble to rise out of the water. These aren't like the static bubbles that you can direct yourself out of - touching one simply pops it and propels you upward a short distance. Crucially, bubbles continue to drift along their path once they're spawned, so every screen has you under essentially constant pressure to haul ass toward the next thing. This makes for really compelling gameplay, every screen becoming a tightly-choreographed dance to the next. Despite being yet another map that heavily uses pufferfish tech (along with a few rooms featuring Theo(: The Bubble) near the end), none of it felt stale in the slightest.

Clockwork by fonda1515

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that any level in a platformer that takes place inside a clock will fucking rule." - Jane Austen probably. So long story short, Clockwork is one of the best maps I've ever played, and it sets a new gold standard for levels where you interact with a bunch of moving objects. Too vague? Okay, so you know how hitting touch switches makes blocks move out of the way? In this map, instead of simply removing obstacles, the blocks move at a predictable speed (dictated by the color of the block & switches) and you need to interact with them at specific points on their path. This forces you to keep moving through every screen, much like the bubbles in Madeline: The Bubble, and seeing everything line up perfectly is... so fucking cool. It's so cool! It feels amazing. It feels about as good as Electric Exuberance, and is pretty much identical in terms of movement tech, come to think of it. I've only played a third of the lobby and I already cannot imagine any other map being my favorite over this one. God damn.

Anyway, that's it for this installment. See y'all next time for the rest of the yellows!