March 2024 Line Rider Roundup
Alright, let’s do the March Roundup. First off, I want to thank everyone who reads these. Yes, all five of you. Maybe even ten? Who knows! Honestly, it pains me how in the dark (by bones) Line Rider seems to be right now, despite there being absolutely no shortage of people making compelling, beautiful and honest art in Line Rider, which we definitely saw this month. The higher activity in March is partly thanks to gavinroo538’s Line Rider Detective Competition, in which ten Line Rider creators anonymously submitted tracks and various detectives were tasked to independently figure out who made which one. Shoutout to pocke for being the most devious detective by digging into track creator’s last.fm pages and getting an incredible 8/10 tracks correct! Anyways, some people happened to submit some very cool tracks to this competition, which will be included in this roundup.
Before we get started, I want to mention that I’m always looking for more people to write for this newsletter, not just because it lightens my load (I’m very busy) but also because having a greater diversity of perspectives contributing their insights makes this whole project way more fun and interactive, both to make and to read! So I’m opening this up — if you have a review of a Line Rider track from the previous month you want to submit for the roundup, you can send it to me in a message on Discord — our username is twigxcabaret! I encourage people to write about tracks that make you feel something, and to share those feelings if you’re comfortable doing so. And while there isn’t necessarily a hard deadline, I request that you try to submit your reviews by the 15th (the middle) of each month if you want to guarantee that it gets in on time. Feel free to also submit reviews after the 15th — it’s possible I’ll miss it though!
A very big thank you to September for her lovely, off-the-wall reviews this month. This roundup would not be the same without her input, and my life would not be the same without her friendship and kindness.
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Trustfall - william017
Review by Jade:
[cw: body horror, flashing lights]
If william017’s Montreal depicted an abstract landscape of disgust and fear towards one’s physical surroundings and the struggle of navigating an unaccomodating societal and infrastructural hellscape, then Trustfall is its directional counterpart, depicting an abstract landscape of disgust and horror towards one’s self — specifically, the unaccomodating hellscape that is one’s body. Being set to an underscores song with lyrics like “bleeding out my gums” and “coughing up a lung, dry cough and my bloodshot eyes”, Trustfall invites us into the gradually worsening anxiety of being a meat sack, full of fluids, organs, acids, teeth, and several fragile processes that if ever stopped would kill you immediately. As the track builds in intensity, we enter the abstract space of a full-on anxiety attack, with quick cuts to offsled flailing that feel like elaborations on the flashing scribbles in the first chorus of UTD’s Headlock — our perception of our own bodies becomes a scream, a doom spiral, a constant threat to your life and well-being, a cancer that moves too fast, a collection of bugs chewing out your brain from the inside out— until…
We suddenly find ourselves in a quaint forest with hills and trees and dirt. After the sea of harsh reds, pinks, blacks and whites, there’s a sudden mental switch and we’re treated with a palette of soft desaturated greens, browns and blues as we find ourselves in an actual place for the first time in the track. Judging by Bosh’s movement not interacting with the environment, we are clearly still dissociated and ungrounded from our physical surroundings as well as the ecosystem, but slowly coming down from the anxiety as a simple melody plays on guitar. We realize that even if we are stuck in gross meat suits, we are more importantly, animals roaming around in a meadow, and that somehow, you aren’t going to die right now and it will be okay. We are Earth and we come from the same place as the dirt and the trees and the grass, and william017 beautifully explores how this connection to nature is a form of self-soothing.
The art style of Trustfall is truly one-of-a-kind in Line Rider. The minimalist start-stop harmonic accompaniment of the music paired with the consistently noisy drawings creates some of the most beautiful moments of visual-to-auditory dissonance in Line Rider I’ve ever seen, and william017 doesn’t fall into the trap of formulaically overemphasising the synth like DavJT’s Geometry Dash level of the same name. Instead, william017 focuses mostly on the raw emotions of the song, fully aware that it will feel like a struggle against the harsh silence of the music and how much that tension would elevate the track’s feelings of helplessness and disconnection. With the harsh shapes and eye-catching colours, the balance between clean geometries and messy action painting… it’s just such a stylistically captivating and original work of art. Like many other Geometry Dash people who have gotten into Line Rider, william017 is really pushing the boundaries of what Line Rider art can look like with Trustfall and Montreal — they are probably the Line Rider artist whose work I am looking forward to the most at the moment, and I really can’t recommend this track and artist enough.
With My Hands Out - MoonXplorer
Review by September:
In late 2022 and early 2023, MoonXplorer created a run of short but narratively and emotionally evocative tracks that concluded with I think you’re really beautiful, which gave viewers a compelling look into MoonXplorer’s own developing perspective on creativity and artmaking. Sadly, after making what felt like an opening artistic statement about creating things in Line Rider, MoonXplorer ceased making Line Rider videos for the rest of the year, and it seemed like that was the end of that. However, MoonXplorer has become one of those few who return to the medium after an initial loss of interest, and has graced us with a new track in the form of With My Hands Out, a full-length work set to the Mount Eerie song of the same name and featuring a colorful and scribbly landscape artstyle… wait…
So, yeah, it’s very clear at even a cursory glance that With My Hands Out takes a lot of inspiration from my own Voice in Headphones. Which, honestly, I don’t mind at all—if anything, I find it a bit flattering! And I can’t really complain about someone “ripping off” my artstyle in Voice in Headphones, because that track was my own attempt to “rip off” Jade’s artstyle and visual themes in tracks like Don’t Worry. In fact, I wouldn’t really describe this kind of successive creative imitation as “ripping off” in the first place. Instead, what we’re seeing here is the creation of lineages of creative inspiration, influence, and tradition—processes that are a natural outgrowth of any creative community. And without sounding too self-aggrandizing, MoonXplorer clearly has thoughtful taste in whom he chooses to copy. Voice in Headphones and Don’t Worry open up such a powerful creative space that neither I nor anyone else has had all that much opportunity to explore further, and by dipping his toe into that wellspring of ideas, he has managed to create something emotionally powerful and resonant.
As opposed to the escalating downhill climax of Voice in Headphones, With My Hands Out presents a more static landscape that builds emotional tension instead of releasing it. And alongside emotionally-rendered natural scenes featuring sunsets, vines, beaches, and cities, MoonXplorer intersperses the track with scenes of the body in the throes of what seems like anxiety or desire—giant hands reach out from the earth, while a more human-sized figure is depicted sopping wet, or lying on the ground beneath the words “take me.” If Voice in Headphones was a triumphant exclamation of love and joy upon finding connection and found family within the Line Rider community, With My Hands Out is its inverse, an act of searching for the kind of connection that Voice in Headphones loudly proclaims is possible.
And this tension is only relieved in a moment of direct communication with others in the final moments of the track. “Would you still remember me?” MoonXplorer asks an unspecified interlocutor; “Yes I would,” is their response. This moment is maybe a bit of a cheeky reference to MoonXplorer’s own absence from the Line Rider community, but the work it does is wide-ranging. Wanting to be remembered, seen, understood—in a couple of short sentences, MoonXplorer drew out these themes so central to my work (as well as the work of Jade and so many other Line Rider creators), and re-articulated them in his own way in the service of his own self-understanding. When I watch this track, I think a lot about how shortly after releasing it, MoonXplorer came out to his family (and the Line Rider community) as bisexual and I can’t help but think about the ways in which those things feel connected to me. This kind of queer transmission of knowledge is powerful, important stuff, and it emphasizes that the creative work we do within the Line Rider community has an effect that informs the lives and thinking of others. And that this little community (and my work specifically!) could have such an important effect on a young person like MoonXplorer as they move through their adolescence and discover themselves is so beautiful and humbling to see.
Killer - bones
Review by Jade:
After countless little experiments exploring musical visualisation, scenic worldbuilding, and a gorgeous minimalist approach to colour and geometry, Bones has finally made his first track that feels narratively charged. Bones uses the various unique aspects of his visual style and blends them together like a painter chooses colours from their palette and blends them into brilliant, imperfect gradients. Killer is simultaneously all of the above and none of the above: it is a choreographed visualization of the musical textures and lyrics, and it isn’t. It is a story told through the gradually evolving scenery we pass by, and it isn’t. It is a showcase of a carefully-chosen, geometrically-consistent colour palette, and it isn’t. It’s a little bit impossible to place this track into some kind of genre or idiom of Line Rider because of how many weird in-betweennesses it manages to occupy: it’s quiet but so, so intense. The track feels both fast and slow at the exact same time. The lyrics are murderous and violent yet loving and sincere. This whole track is sort of being eaten by a hellish inferno — the intro shows an entire street of houses and walk-up apartments catching fire — but because of how bones uses blank space, these fires barely feel like a threat. Like, those fires would give off a very different emotion if they were drawn against a dark background like in Mount Eerie, or filled in completely like the eternal flames of Centralia Fire, but against the white blank canvas of Line Rider the orange outlines of flames feel gentle, almost hospitable, “harmless in death”. There’s a few moments and glimpses of real-world imagery like the aforementioned houses, a life-support machine and a figure of a body under a blanket, but the overall physical space of this track cannot be pinned down and defined — it’s simultaneously floaty and grounded, weaving together the real, the imaginary, and the abstract.
Through making a track that lives in a space between several genres, emotions, and visual styles, Bones is able to capture the weird in-between spaces that make up most of our actual lives, especially in relationships. Though it’s visually abstracted, given the choice of song, I think that Killer has a lot to say about being vulnerable and intimate with others. The fires that burn throughout this track have the power to violently kill us and to softly warm us, and their ignition is both an act of destruction and creation. Vulnerability is like fire — it’s the most dangerous thing to step foot into, but can also be a catalyst for building personal and communal safety. Fire can be a representation of both death and home, and this track lingers on how those two things are interconnected. With every track Bones puts out I am more and more excited for where he’ll bring his art next, and Killer is a timid yet courageous step into some really beautiful thematic and emotional territory.
UWA! So Holiday♫ - StarySky
Review by Jade:
For a 30-second Line Rider short, StarySky’s six-rider track set to the “UWA! So Holiday” jingle from Undertale is densely packed with playful visual ideas that are nothing short of brilliant. It goes by pretty quick, so I’ll summarize each of the ideas one by one:
UWA! So Holiday♫ immediately sets a precedent of colour coordination by showing us six lines that correspond to the path and scarf colour of an individual rider.
The six riders all contact their first track line (drawn in black) at the same time and all rotate in the same direction. Upon hitting their second lines, they all contact the line with the nose of their sled, but their angles and x-positions drift off from one another. This drift amplifies with each of the following track lines; the riders’ paths overlap and they all start moving in their own directions.
Because the track lines are all drawn in black but are all connected with coloured lines that match the riders’ scarves, the drift between the riders’ movements is visibly reflected in the arrangement of the lines and their colours.
On top of this, StarySky has shaded the background to be slightly darker specifically behind areas containing black track lines, so since the six riders’ paths begin in parallel, the background displays a shaded vertical band where all the track lines have the same x-position. As the track lines drift apart into more dynamic arrangements, these shaded bands warble and distort with each beat of the song to create some really wonderful formations that simultaneously resemble rocky landscapes and coffee stains.
After a moment of ten-point cannon unison, we enter a section where the riders cruise on some straight black lines with no colours, until— oh no!— the colours of their scarves are shooting out into a rainbow into the sky! We have to be reunited with our coloured line companions — so the riders spend the rest of the track jumping up the black lines in time to the music in order to rearrange themselves into the same order as the coloured lines. The song ends just in time for each rider to be back together with their corresponding colours— phew!
UWA! So Holiday♫ is a wonderful little adventure that knows how to have a lot of fun with its ideas in its short runtime. It definitely succeeds at being a pretty music visualizer, but I think it’s also really cool that StarySky managed to make it feel like each rider has an incentive to sort themselves out at the end — like the riders had too much of a fun party time in the first section, and had to scramble to get themselves back in order in the latter half. It might be the coolest 30-second Line Rider track I’ve ever watched — I highly recommend!
We Need to Get It Together - gavinroo538
Review by Jade:
We Need to Get It Together is a very pretty and thematically mysterious movement track. Autumn’s usual emotional sensitivities toward manuquirk and little flourishes of expression are put on full, shining display here; however, the most memorable aspect of We Need to Get It Together are the dozens of additional motionless riders that have been scattered around the track. Because there are no drawn symbols or images in the whole track, these hovering riders are the only decorative element — they effectively are the track’s scenery, while also acting as mechanical benchmarks to shift the focus of the camera in hypnotic ways. Due to their stark stillness, these decorative riders feel like bystanders or strangers — we know lots about the central protagonist rider and how they navigate the world, but never how anyone else might move or feel. It reminds me of walking around in the world, going down the shady overgrown path to the train station, getting on the train, and passing by all these people I know are living lives as rich and complicated as my own, but never knowing anything about them. There’s a simultaneous togetherness and loneliness, and this effect comes to a climax at the three-minute mark when a whole sea of riders passes by to a dreamy vocal run. But with gavinroo538 proclaiming in the description, “We need to get it together. Let's all look out for each other and LOVE LINE RIDER!!!” — We Need to Get It Together seems to be about this communal understanding that even if you and I and people on the street know nothing about each other’s personal lives, we are in this together on a large scale, whether it be thousands of strangers in cities uniting in protest, or just a handful of strangers feebly coming together to share an interest in Line Rider.
Pretending - pocke
Review by Jade:
Pretending is pocke’s fifth full track set to a Sweet Trip song, and I think it’s the most organized and cohesive of the bunch so far. pocke expertly uses layer automation to animate and bring life to various doodles around the track, as well as the lyrics of the choruses. These lyrics pop up in bold text in a fixed camera position while the rider recycles the same section of track, crashing into the same wall and dismounting on the word “dead”. I like how in these chorus sections, pocke chooses to keep much of the track lines visible with an aesthetically messy smattering of ten-point-cannons, and I also like how pocke elaborates on the central idea in the second chorus by placing the words at oblique angles around spinning clocks.
Thematically and lyrically, the track seems to be about how you can’t deny that you will die one day, but with its light and fluffy energy, Pretending almost puts me at ease about the immanency of death, and takes the pressure off of having to “live your life to fullest” — you can just be silly and do fun things, like how this track does! And with its cute and personalized decorations, Pretending flourishes with little glimpses into pocke’s everyday life, like doing homework, walking around, painting and doodling, or just thinking about things. I recommend this track — it’s super creative and a very easy viewing experience.
Detective Comp Submission - September Hofmann
Review by Jade:
In her review of bones’ instant classic in the dark from this past January, September talks at impressive length about her deep adoration for tightly-synced music visualizations in Line Rider — about how she enjoys them so much and so badly wishes she had the dexterity and focus to create something idiomatic to that genre. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that when tasked to make a track that did not resemble her own work for gavinroo538’s Line Rider Detective competition, she would use the opportunity to give it a shot and pretend to be someone else. What is surprising is how damn convincing her entry turned out to be — I was personally fooled and guessed it was made by Malizma, because after September’s in the dark review where she expressed longing to be able to produce a track like this, I thought Malizma was the only person who was remotely able to pull off a track this tight and specific and Geometry Dash-esque — it was definitely a bold play on September’s part.
But even after the gamer tactics of the competition, this track really stands out to me. By intentionally attempting to copy the style of Malizma, the track is about emphasizing what one creator loves about another creator’s style and artistic practice. September has studied Malizma’s formula closely, and in the opening seconds she sets up a consistent colour palette and pattern of the rider’s movement, only to quickly subvert those patterns as the background and track lines start protruding out at curved and oblique angles to express the vocal punctures and other silly noises in the music. This develops until there is a brief quieter interlude where the rider switches to smooth manualing along the background lines, instead of bouncing on the sharp little sticks from beforehand. Then, in a musical section with text-to-speech lyrics, September expresses her love of the humour, comedic gags, as well as the technological fascination of Malizma’s work, adding just a little bit of her own personal style and typography into each drawing. I really enjoy this track for how it cements itself in community with others in a very specific, direct and silly way, and it also happens to be extremely cool to watch.
Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires - Branches
Review by September:
Both this and the inexplicable Quirk Tracks were Jade’s two releases this month, and—considering that I don’t have much to say about Quirk Tracks (beyond something insane like “it’s about how life just keep happening on and on in boring and specific ways even after our circumstances change significantly, and therefore functions as the perfect anticlimax epilogue to both Mount Eerie and There Are People")—I wanted to talk about Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires instead.
Alongside quite a few releases from this month, Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires was an entry into Autumn’s Line Rider Detectives contest, where trackmakers submitted tracks anonymously that participants had to then figure out who made what track. I would say that the contest was a tremendous success, not least of all because people went pretty all out with their submissions to the contest, including some great tracks from long-time Line Rider creators like pocke, Ray, Arglin, and yours truly. And, of course, Jade, whose track is perhaps the most artistically complete out of the entire bunch. Similarly to the things Jade has said about her review of my submission to the detectives contest, I feel deeply compelled and energized by the way this work—by nature of the contest—eschews much of Jade’s typical Line Rider idiom in favor of a brand-new style which many of the participants in the contest mistook for my own. The most striking of these style changes is typographical in nature—like her illustrations, Jade often renders text in a dynamic and fluid way, blurring the boundaries between text, identity, track, and environment. Even in moments where she writes out text in a different font, such as in the “big black death” section of Mount Eerie, the scribbly text feels as though it rises out of the scribbly environment; the text is a consequence of the track. Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires, however, reverses this relationship: the text imposes an order onto the movement and the environment, featuring spiky, graffiti-like fonts and a massive-feeling text-visualizer section rendered in bold cursive. Paired with Jade’s fantastic knack for color and atmosphere, we end up with a track that feels very singular within her body of work. It isn’t particularly heavy on the narrative/symbolic meaning or anything like that—but when something can so expertly take us into the mood of the song through movement, color, and text, it doesn’t need anything else to take us to a place of emotional depth.
Dimensions - Aerial Adventures
[cw: photosensitivity]
Review by September:
If you follow new Line Rider releases as much as I have these past few years, you end up finding that random brand-new Line Rider videos tend to fall into a few broad categories based on the types of YouTube channels that release them. Obviously, these categories are not all-encompassing, and many channels might fall outside of these categories or into multiple of these categories at the same time. But archetypes like
“11-year-old child,”
“kid’s media content farm,”
“doodlechaos ripoff,”
“adult that remembers playing Line Rider as a child who releases a single techdawg-styled scenery track in order to prove something to themselves,” and
“random person from the geometry dash community”
are useful for thinking about broad patterns within the new and non-“LR community” people who are releasing Line Rider tracks. For example, the amount of poorly screen-recorded footage from young children who release Line Rider tracks tells us that .com’s export features are not very useful or intuitive for a newbie. Or how the fact that many of the TechDawg childhood psychodrama people don’t upload their tracks with music reflects their lack of interest in the music-sync era of Line Rider, while the DoodleChaos ripoffs use classical music to, well… rip off DoodleChaos. Being able to make these connections gives us a fascinating look into the general forces that drive interest and engagement with our weird little un-monetizable artform—and it gives us some explanatory potential for understanding some particularly odd patterns in Line Rider track releases.
Dimensions—alongside Line Rider except it’s actually heavy dubstep [cw: rapid strobing lights]—is one of a pair of releases from Aerial Adventures, a brand new Line Rider creator who seems to fit closest with the “kid’s media content farm” archetype; their other videos are a grab bag of thrill-focused entertainment, including roller coaster footage and music-synced montage videos of other video games. Aerial Adventures’ Line Rider tracks are no exception to this trend, resulting in an “epic gaming montage” trackmaking sensibility; namely, Dimensions green-screens its track atop a bunch of random 3d-animation stock footage unified only by a vague “sci-fi” theme. It absolutely is worth a watch, if only just for the surreal and hilarious experience of watching Bosh bounce in front of a videogame-protagonist-ass spaceman as he lightly jogs towards the galactic heavens.
The whole thing actually reminds me a whole lot of another Line Rider track which uses greenscreen to a similar sort of bizarro-kid’s-entertainment effect: Running Races in the Future. It’s not quite a 1-to-1 comparison—Dimensions is focused on music sync while Running Races in the Future isn’t synced at all in order to focus on the “race” aspect—but I can’t help but see a resemblance to those Boshes racing each other as an inhumanly intense fireworks display goes off in the night sky behind them. It’s an understandable instinct for someone to arrive at—the infinite white void behind Bosh naturally drives people to fill it, either with scenery or with green-screened footage; Winter Night by Noah Clement is a quintessential example of this technique being effectively used for artistic effect. And while of course both Dimensions and Running Races in the Future use green-screening for their own artistic goals, the sensory loudness of these examples feels particularly distinct. It feels less like these tracks are trying to simply fill the infinite white void, and more like they are trying to drown it out completely.
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising to see that both tracks fit within a certain “kid’s media content farm” archetype, given the rise of YouTube kids baby sensory videos and TikTok videos that layer like five kinds of content on top of each other—they’re both an attempt at a Line Rider version of “Minecraft parkour while a TTS voice reads out reddit posts.” Unlike Minecraft parkour or subway surfers, however, it seems as though Line Rider is substantially unsuited to this task—the effect is not one of distracted engagement content-watching, but one of utter bewilderment. Of course, Line Rider tracks are just harder to make in general compared to simple gameplay footage, but I feel as though there is something more fundamental about Line Rider as a medium which makes it resistant to this kind of content creation, and the high amount of editing we see in Dimensions and Running Races in the Future seems as though it demonstrates why that is: Line Rider is boring.
Another fairly recent trend amongst the particularly low-effort content farm Line Rider channels is placing animated stickers atop the track that comment on what is happening. Almost all of them feature one of these stickers declaring “boring” after a mere half a second of Bosh sledding moderately slowly over a flat section as a kind of feeble attempt to comment on the strange, empty boredom of Line Rider in order to distract us from it. Now, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying—I don’t mean this negatively in the slightest. Boredom is, in fact, a powerful emotion, so powerful that many will choose to give themselves an electric shock in order to avoid the sensation of it. And boredom can often be the catalyst for moments of personal reflection and creative insight—it forces us to be with our own thoughts and emotions. It is, fundamentally, an existential experience; Boredom is an encounter with the void. And deep within Line Rider’s DNA is this sort of encounter, from its continuous long-take camera to its minimalist controls and color scheme to the actual infinite void that surrounds Bosh. In order to drown out that spirit of boredom, that existential encounter with the void, tracks like Dimensions and Running Races in the Future have attempted to employ so much video editing that Line Rider becomes almost unrecognizable, taking on a form closer to Geometry Dash or a music-synced gameplay montage. And so it’s no coincidence that Geometry Dash creators—like CatAtKmart or William017—are some of the best at using these kinds of techniques effectively.
Maybe, then, Line Rider is a medium which works primarily with the organization of boredom. Line Rider has often been described as a ‘time waster’ which children play when they are ‘bored’ at the school. And Bevibel’s This Will Destroy You—one of the most well-known tracks of all time—lets us sit with this boredom for the length of an entire album, working with the interplay between stillness and action, until that boredom spills over into a catharsis which, yes, destroys us, uses its boredom as a catalyst for transformation and inspiration and change. In this way, Line Rider remains resistant to attempts to incorporate it into simple “content farm” type schemas—service to Line Rider requires service to the divine forces of the void, and the content farms are too bound to other eldritch entities (capitalism, the algorithm) in order to pledge their fealty.
So uhhhhhh…. yeah!!! Dimensions is pretty cool, I guess! It’s also really funny and made me laugh a lot, and there’s a lot of interesting editing ideas that other people should steal for themselves. It’s a fun time, even if you aren’t insane like me and have some kind of weird encounter with The Way We Refuse Encounter with the Void and the Fundamental Existential Nature of Line Rider or whatever—honestly, you’ll probably enjoy it better that way.
A message to myself - CatAtKmart
[cw: themes of self-harm and suicide]
Review by Jade:
Cat’s vent track, A message to myself, is a challenging one — it’s completely all over the map in terms of visual style and presentation, sporadically cutting between Line Rider and camera-shot footage, as well as different rider skins, screen filters, and very different styles of trackmaking — and I think that’s because A message to myself is about this feeling of searching everywhere and finding nothing. The most direct message communicated in this track is that there is a suicidality stewing, indicated by the drawings and writing in the section that switches between various angles of a computer screen, as well as various cuts throughout the track to drawings of scissor blades as well as text reading “YOU ARE NOT FINE”— but the inclusion of other sections like the intro, the middle manuquirk frenzy, and the inexplicably melancholic 1997 highway road-trip footage at the end is really interesting to me because of how they fail to communicate any sort of specific “message” for oneself, and so this track ends up being about this feeling of frantically trying so many different things out and not really getting anywhere better. It’s kind of brutal and hopeless which is why I’m not sure if I’d recommend it to others — for an audience, it doesn’t reach outwards to the viewer, I think intentionally, because this is a track intended for solely its creator. But maybe you’ll still find it interesting and that it connects to you, and I really appreciate Cat for sharing this personal and honest art with us.
Speed Round!
Nightmare by CatAtKmart is sort of like Cat’s response to Dimensions (reviewed above), employing its explosive style of green-screen video editing to make something just as visually noisy, but much more moody and atmospheric. Lots of neat ideas presented in a very Geometry Dash effect-level format, in a good way.
One of the neatest tracks to come out of the Line Rider Detective Competition was Cruisin’ by Arglin, a direct imitation of the style of QBalt that really showed me the potential for serenity that QBalt’s style could have. The choreographed flings intermixed with the dots of the night sky are really pretty here.
I’m just a ghost by Anonymous is pretty obviously made by someone in the Line Rider community with a lot of technical skill but who is just starting to give themselves permission to tell stories with Line Rider. They posted a few track experiments on their account this month, with I’m just a ghost probably being the one that successfully communicated an emotion: feeling ambiently detached from reality and people.
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