May 2022 Line Rider Roundup

I called last month’s roundup a doozy, which is the exact same thing I want to say about this one now. Welp! I guess when it rains it pours. Don’t worry, there are no 4,000-word reviews of 45-minute tracks this month, just a number of longish reviews of regular-length releases because there’s a lot to say!

I do want to issue an especially heavy suicide content warning for the first two reviews in this roundup (I Want To Be Well and No Surprises). Don’t watch the videos or read the reviews unless you’re okay with reading descriptions of specific methods of suicide and well as seeing depictions of specific suicidal acts (though depictions are a bit more abstract in No Surprises). Please take care of yourselves.

Also, I’m thrilled to welcome back Ava Hofmann as guest reviewer for Just Far Enough, as well as Twig (from the channel Branches) for Anemoia 2. I’m so glad to have as many recurring guest reviewers as I do, and I strongly hope this continues into the future.

Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.

🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended

I Want To Be Well - Ava Hofmann

[cw: suicide, self harm/cutting, mental illness, drug use, dysphoria, religious imagery]

It’s hard to know where to start with this one, so I’ll start here: This feels to me like Ava Hofmann’s Line Rider magnum opus. This is not to say she’ll never go on to create bigger and better things in the future, but looking at her body of work as it stands today, I Want To Be Well is a culmination of thoughts and ideas and experiments and techniques and messages she’s been messing with and working on since she started with Line Rider back in February 2021. All at once, it’s a lyric video, a music visualizer, a story of personal struggle, and a choreographed traversal through an animated comic book about mental illness. Which is to say, I Want To Be Well, in my view, is Line Rider at its absolute best. If you haven’t seen it, and you can stomach the themes, I highly recommend it. With that out of the way, this review is essentially going to be me gushing about all the things I love about this piece, so here we go!

The majority of I Want To Be Well could be described as some form of lyric video. Ava has made lyrics-heavy Line Rider releases before, and the Friends in Low Places-style scrawl is re-used in certain key moments to great effect, but the majority of the lyrics in I Want To Be Well are drawn out in a new distinctive stylization, a kind of all-caps font where the words bend and twist around each other and the track itself. It’s not always legible, but it’s easy to get the sense that the more important bits are more legible and it’s ok if you don’t catch every word, and it also feeds into a general tone of emotional stress and distortion.

There are lots of little ways that I Want To Be Well subtly, sneakily shifts in tone over the course of the video, that might sound like mistakes if described straightforwardly. For example, the music visualizations of the drums as squares and circles that the track opens with drop out unceremoniously around the 45-second mark for no apparent reason, but they’ve laid the groundwork for the Xs visualizing the claps, which then creates a really powerful moment a minute later when music-synced layer-automation animating the Xs suddenly reveals after the lyric “do yourself” the words “A DEATH”, the first time the character in the video contemplates suicide (and shortly after the first time in the piece there’s dismount immediately followed by a remount, setting up that this is representative of some sort of suicidal attempt or ideation), marking the start of the second section of the piece, where this must now be reckoned with. The music visualization also sets up the concept of visualizing the flutes with these swirly spirals, which then creates a really powerful moment at the end of this second section, right after the words on screen that (almost) represent the lyrics:

OH I WOULD RATHER BE DEAD
BUT I WOULD RATHER BE DEAD FINE

Then the drums cut out, as Bosh sleds through abstract spirals and gives you a moment to contemplate the implications of that. The swirls get denser, then sketchier, and then finally flicker away, as we enter the third section, what I call “the I Want To Be Well section” (it makes if you’ve seen the video).

Up until this point, we’ve seen various appearances of a strangely hairy humanoid figure vaguely reminiscent of the character from My Pal Foot Foot and Know Thy Self. In section one, they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with them, haunted by chronic illness, wondering why they’re not “normal” or “ordinary” like everyone else, if it all stemmed from something they did wrong, or if it was something they had no control over and could never have done anything about. There’s also some sneaky layer-automation (inspired by Toivo’s Dream) that makes changes to visuals while they’re just out of frame, creating a feeling of being gaslit, or, as the lyrics put it, “hysteria”. In the second section, reckoning with the fact that they’re suicidal, they reflect on how their illness and their loneliness are intertwined, concluding that they need to figure something out or these feelings are only going to get worse.

In this third section, as the title lyric plays over and over and over, Bosh rides a gentle, smooth, repetitive wave pattern as the lyrics are written out beneath the track, a repetition of the title over and over and over. The camera slowly pans up and zooms out, and then a sequence of images being to appear above - an extraordinarily effective way to portray a kind of meditation, as our character tries to get to the bottom of their feelings. Turns out, it’s real bad. There are so many things that are causing this character pain and stress, some of them more obvious than others. Drawings flash past the screen about everything from drug use, to self harm, to religion, to insomnia, to verbal abuse, to suicidal thoughts, to dysphoria, to isolation. And after we’ve seen all this, after this strange character’s heart has been utterly exposed, a spectre depicted only by a pair of eyes plucks it out of their chest, stares at it for a moment, and then crushes it in their hand, a tear running down their cheek as they close their eyes. It’s one of the most powerful sequences I’ve ever seen in Line Rider, and it is utterly devastating. In the end, it’s all just too much to deal with. This character has decided that suicide is the only feasible option, as Bosh accelerates and most of the track turns red as we enter the fourth section, and lyrics fill the screen:

I’M NOT FUCKING AROUUUUUUUUOUOOUOOUOOOOOOOOND
I’M NOOOT
I’M NOOOOOOOT
I’M NOT FUCKING AROUUUUUUAUUUUUUOAOOOAUUUUUUUUUUUUUAUUAUUNNNND
I’M NOOOOOOOT
I’M NOOOOOOOT

And then the drums finally come back in as the character enters full-blown suicide planning mode, attempting various methods - wrist slashing, shotgun to the head, pill overdose, jumping off a bridge, hanging by the neck - each flashes past the screen as Bosh dismounts and remounts with white-knuckled abandon (featuring fantastic use of invisible lines). But even as things hit their worst point, we can still see the refrain of “I WANT TO BE WELL” over and over - small, off to the side, easy to miss in the chaos and turmoil, but still there - one of the only things that still hasn’t shifted to red.

Then, suddenly, a surprise. As Bosh falls upward into the night sky, we land on a spaceship with pink stars and blue squares floating around it. On the brink of total self-destruction, the character was sucked up by the transgender aliens’ tractor beam. In this fifth section, the premise of this being a music visualizer or lyric video is almost entirely dropped to focus on the story, as the character wades through the confusing world of medical science to modify their body and being to transition, finally realizing that this was a huge factor impeding their ability to improve their situation, in a delightfully queer twist on Sufjan Steven’s cryptic lyrics about '“unholy changes” to the body. This is not a quick fix, or the end of the story - far from it - but now this character can finally get to work. And that’s when we enter the sixth and final section of the track, The Spiral.

As the song moves into another chorus of “I’m not fucking around”, Bosh enters a massive spiral and beings moving outward. But as we move further and further out, it becomes increasingly clear that this spiral is way bigger than it looked on the way in. When the drums come back in, Bosh flies off the line and starts flying every which way across the spiral (using invisible lines), and even then there’s no edge in sight. This thing is absolutely gargantuan. As Jade (AKA Branches) put it in a comment on the video,

There’s something terrifying about this part, something confrontational that really freaks us out. It’s something we’ve been avoiding - a moment of diving right into the root of all your fear, trauma, and self-hatred, and facing it head-on, thinking you can overcome it, but then when Bosh falls of the line, we realize - holy shit - this spiral is this fucking huge. A giant looming entity with no end. An invisible titan.

I want to emphasize that this part takes up nearly an entire minute, and Bosh continues to accelerate and move more and more erratically the entire time. The lines of the spiral passing by begin to blur with speed, you lose all sense of progress and direction and scale, and still there’s no end in sight, as this spiral becomes a nightmarish eldritch prison. Bosh finally flies off the sled completely, as the spiral lines increase in frequency number until the screen is entirely black, and then they suddenly find themself thrashing violently, painfully, helplessly, in a tiny, swirling void, unable to cope with the enormity of the task before them. It’s an incredible moment that completely nails the paradoxical claustrophobia of the feeling that a problem is too impossibly vast to ever escape.

The camera then pans away from Bosh, focusing on an empty speech bubble surrounded by chaotic animated scribbles. After waiting a bit for them to subside, a sequence of words are animated:

Hey, Ava.

It’s Ava.

you don’t have to do this alone anymore.

sounds fake, i know.

but there are so many people who give a shit about you.

they like you. the real you.

i know, in a world like this, in a body like this, this is a hard thing to ask:

but i need you to let go of your fear.

And then, in the speech bubble, an illustration of the moon appears, partially obscured by clouds, to end the video.

As you can likely tell from how I just went through most of the story beats of the entire piece in detail, in my opinion I Want To Be Well has refined innumerable ideas and techniques Ava has been experimenting with for a while now to create one of the most powerful narratives ever crafted in Line Rider. My Pal Foot Foot, for example, was a surprisingly impactful piece, and Know Thy Self was a powerful autobiographical story, but both felt experimental and sketchy in both tone and structure. In I Want To Be Well, by contrast, Ava comes across as extremely confident in the telling exactly the story she wants to tell, in exactly the way she wants to tell it, in ways that could only ever be done in Line Rider, and could only ever be made by her. It’s a rough ride, but if you can relate to the story, perhaps you’ll feel seen, and if you can’t, perhaps it’ll help you improve empathy and understanding for Ava and people with similar stories and struggles.
🙌

No Surprises - gavinroo538

[cw: suicide, depression, anxiety]

This one hit me hard. I’ve been having a bit of a rough time for the last… uhhhhhh… ok let me level with you and get uncomfortably real for the rest of this paragraph, and probably throughout the rest of this review. I’ve been in and out of “having a rough time” for the last 10 years with varying frequency and severity, and while there have been plenty of good times too, that fact makes it really hard to put a number on how long I been “having a rough time” exactly. It feels like a routine at this point. Like, ah, yes, hello, my old friend, Feeling Miserable™. I figured you were gonna turn up again sooner or later, even though I kind of hoped you were gone for good this time, but even having that hope dashed is starting to feel like a routine at this point. Generally speaking, if not ideal, this arrangement is at least manageable. Sometimes I can even convince myself that it’s just a natural part of life - feeling better some days/months/years, and feeling worse others - but the truth is, if I had any ideas for how to change any of it that I hadn’t already tried (or weren’t extremely risky), I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to try all of them. In the last year or so, though, something especially concerning has started to happen. Though there has been no significant change in my current life situation, this stuff has been getting worse. And I’m not talking about the normal cycles of feeling good sometimes and bad other times - it’s subtle and slow, but the good times are becoming more and more fleeting and weak, and the bad times are getting worse than they’ve ever been on average and taking longer to pass, and these things are becoming more and more stark as time passes. It’s hard to know what to do when even thinking about it also seems to exacerbate the problem. Everything I do that does make a difference feels like it’s fighting against some invisible tide - high risk for incremental gain, that backslides easier and more quickly the more time marches onward.

When I watched No Surprises, I was expecting to like it. I wasn’t expecting it to reach inside my soul, rip out my heart, and hand it back to me.

In my 2021 video essay, I wrote that I had never been suicidal, and that was absolutely true when I wrote it in the spring of 2021, but I don’t think it’s true anymore. It’s not like a switch flipped one day or anything - it’s crept up on me over the last year or so. First you’re just thinking, “Wow I would really like to not exist for a while, I can’t handle this kind of responsibility.” Then after marinating in that feeling for a while, you think, “If this is just going to keep happening, maybe it would be nice to just stop existing entirely.” Then that slowly morphs into, “You know, if I just went to sleep tonight and didn’t wake up, I don’t know if that would be the worst thing ever.” And then you watch a sad Line Rider track with song lyrics scrawled across the screen:

I’LL TAKE A QUIET LIFE
A HANDSHAKE OF CARBON MONOXIDE

And you think, you know, if I were to kill myself, honestly? Carbon monoxide poisoning would be a nice way to go. Just go to sleep and never wake up. No more obligations, no new global catastrophes, no more feeling helpless in the face of systemic collapse, no more social interactions and the pain and stress that come along with them, not even any free time and the debilitating decision paralysis that comes with that. Or, as it’s written out in the track itself, in enormous scrawled letters that fill the screen, over and over:

NO ALARMS
NO SURPRISES

During the next section, the bridge, Bosh slowly sleds on a flat line into a cone of darkness over the repeated lyric, “Silence…” with camerawork that makes it feel like we’re slowly breathing in and out, in and out - surrendering to the darkness of that carbon monoxide.

This is my final fit
My final bellyache

These lyrics play as Bosh, surrounded by darkness, beings to twitch, then thrash, and then finally flail wildly, helplessly, in the dark. It’s serene - the music is calm, resigned, resolved. We’re not feeling any of the pain itself, just watching. It’ll all be over in a few seconds.

But then we snap back to reality and the “NO ALARMS / NO SURPRISES” sequence resumes. Because, of course, I wasn’t actually poisoning myself with carbon monoxide. I was just sitting here watching a Line Rider track, daydreaming about what it might be like to die from carbon monoxide poisoning. I was dissociating, because I can’t deal with the reality of my life. But that didn’t actually do anything. I’m right back where I was when I left, endlessly wishing for no alarms and no surprises on repeat. So what can I do about this? Obviously, this situation has gotten out of hand, if I’m now imagining how nice it might be to kill myself in a specific, particular way.

The next section of No Surprises, during the instrumental break in the song, is the most effective portrayal of an anxiety-driven thought spiral I’ve ever seen in Line Rider. Handwritten messages, that range from nervous tics, to random unfiltered thoughts, to micro-existential-crises, fly past the screen fast enough that I couldn’t hope to read them all without pausing, but in trying I could read just enough that it created that familiar cold, terrifying sense of feeling overwhelmed and completely out of control, just like the actual thought spirals I get into sometimes as a chronic overthinker. Gavin has attempted this sort of thing before, in Part 3 of A Rush of Blood to the Head and in WHERE IS MY MIND???, but if I’m being honest, I don’t think I realized what he was going for until now. I was annoyed that I couldn’t read everything without pausing, and I what little I could read without pausing wasn’t really doing anything for me. Well, it all makes more sense to me now, because holy hell was that effective at capturing a very specific feeling I am intimately familiar with, concluding with the thought I always have at the tail end of these things:

Overall…
…I’m just…
…so fucking…
…tired…

All things considered, I had a pretty good childhood. I grew up middle class in a safe neighborhood, went to a pretty good public school, we had pretty stable housing and finances, my sister and I both did well in school, and there were no major issues between any family members. My sister and I still get along, my parents are still married, I still talk to both of them, there was conflict but never abuse, and nothing has ever caused any sort of irreparable damage. But the more I grew up and learned about myself and about the world, the more obvious it has become that, due to a combination of my unique identity, my personal values, systemic structures, and the decline of the society I live in, I will almost certainly never be able to have the life that every adult around me assumed I would have when I was growing up. To be clear, it is largely a good thing that a society founded on white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide is collapsing - don’t get it twisted! - but this also means that unless I sell my soul to capitalism I’m never going to have a steady job that I like with a long-term partner and a salary and a house and a yard and a pet and kids and a 401k retirement plan, like my parents and all their friends and coworkers did. I’m turning 30 in under two months, and at this point I’d be over the moon if I was able to manage even one of those things anytime soon (though if the universe is listening and some of this is possible, I’d like a small affordable apartment with a cat and a girlfriend, please and thank you). It’s hard for me to even imagine what one year in the future might look like, let alone imagining a future where I actually get the things I want. Or even, like, just spitballing here - my basic human needs for interpersonal connection and community support met. In part due to these reasons, visiting my parents’ house these days is really hard on me, not because it’s a bad house or because there are any awful memories - it’s hard because it’s a such a nice house. It’s so fucking nice. I visit my parents and they’re like “Look, we remodeled the kitchen!” and I immediately get an urge to smash everything in the house with a sledgehammer. So in the next section of No Surprises, when the camera zooms way out and we see a drawing of a large house amongst trees and flowers above the scrawled lyrics:

SUCH A PRETTY HOUSE
AND SUCH A PRETTY GARDEN

Let me tell you, that hits. The opening of the track actually sets this moment up really well - the first verse features no lyrics at all, but thin lines scribbled all over the track like spiderwebs, with the lyrics floating on top of them and drawings of sad faces and broken hearts submerged in them, and there’s also a pattern established of zooming in for one section and then zooming out for another section. This climactic moment simply takes those building blocks and heightens them by zooming out even more - the drawing of the house and garden is covered in these spiderwebs, which creates a feeling of distance between it and the viewer. It’s a half-remembered dissociative dream, barely even a real place anymore. And then, as the “NO ALARMS / NO SURPRISES” lyrics return - at first I didn’t even see it, and then I did - above and below, buried in the spiderwebs, are the backup vocals:

GET ME OUT OF HERE
GET ME OUT OF HERE
GET ME OUT OF HERE

And that’s how this track made me cry. Barely, mind you - I choked up, my eyes got wet, there might have been a tear? I wasn’t exactly sobbing. But, crying while watching a Line Rider track for the first time? That’s the first time this has ever happened to me. If you’ve ever seen me blind-react to a new Line Rider release I know nothing about, you probably know there’s often very little reaction at all, even if I really like the piece. Sometimes I’ll laugh, sometimes I’ll shout, “WHAT?”, sometimes I’ll go, “Ooh, I love that!” or, “Nice!”, but actually feeling heavy emotions in real time? It doesn’t happen. Sometimes I’ll full-on cry on the fourth or fifth watch, thinking about something else in my life that the video is able to draw out my feelings around and help me get some kind of catharsis with (This has happened with I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, Everyone Asked About You, Silhouette, and A Rush of Blood to the Head, along with a number of older tracks I’m too embarrassed about to mention here), but this is the first time it happened spontaneously, uncontrollably, upon first viewing.

Does any of this mean that No Surprises is uniquely good or special? That it stands head and shoulders above every other track release? Absolutely not. I am an individual person with my own personal struggles (most of which I have not shared publicly, for that matter!) and it resonated with me in a deeply personal way, much like I talk about how I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You resonated with me in my video essay on it. I think it’s a well-constructed and well-executed piece that taps into some really deep, difficult feelings, and I think people should check it out (though let’s face it, if you read all of this you probably already watched it beforehand), and I hope it resonates with others too, but I think it’s unlikely to be uniquely special to most people. But as for me, well, I can’t stop watching it. I’ve probably watched it an average of once a day in the two weeks since it came out. It got to me in a way no other Line Rider piece has before, so it’ll always be uniquely special to me, and because of that I’m deeply grateful it exists.
🙌

RUSH E - Xavi, Arglin, TheMatsValk, HumanoidXYZ, RetroTune, Malizma, Faintmint, & gavinroo538

It’s about time that we had another track release that embraced the humor inherent in glitchquirk. This was what HAM got right that so many quirks since have failed to understand - rather than trying to make this stuff serious or epic or apathetic or irony-poisoned, to just go as hard as possible on the bizarre glitch-compilation-esque hilarity of it all and see just how silly you can get with it. Work was arguably moving in this direction, but the content of the song, even with an ironic interpretation, was more than enough to make me start wondering what exactly the joke was supposed to be within the first few seconds, and then it dragged that same tired “joke” out for nearly four minutes.

RUSH E, on the other hand, is set to a song that’s a perfect fit for glitchquirk and 10-point-cannon spam, the ubiquitous black MIDI piece by Sheet Music Boss from 2018 that entered meme orbit around 2020. This isn’t the first Rush E Line Rider release (CrazyGameMaster and Garry the Fish have both made attempts, among others) but it’s the first one that I’ve actually enjoyed. Scratch that - I didn’t just enjoy this track, I had an absolute blast. Large-scale quirk collaborations often have a tendency to hit maximum intensity within seconds, leaving the piece nowhere to go when the song ramps up, and the result is a track that gets boring and stale really fast. Not so with RUSH E - the creators have, for the most part, done a commendable job of keeping the opening moments relatively chill and restrained, and saving the most hilarious and intense ideas for the bombastic climax of the piece. At the same time, the power of 10-point-cannons is hinted at right from the beginning, with micro-moments of teleportation or of Bosh freaking out for a fraction of a second before continuing on the same path that foreshadow what’s to come and create a delightful sense of anticipation. But there are plenty of surprises in store.

The final 30 seconds of RUSH E (credit to Arglin, Malizma, and especially Xavi) is an unmitigated delight. The first moment that made me laugh was on the first slam-the-entire-piano moment, where Bosh is violently ripped from the sled and flung around before immediately remounting, a move which felt totally unexpected to me (and thus, extremely funny). The second thing that made me laugh was Bosh vibrating back and forth across the screen while a track line is animated to morph into a 3D letter E. And the final 10 seconds - well, I’ll let you experience that for yourself. It’s a treat.

I think one thing that makes this piece work so well is the ability of the creators to really think outside the box, especially towards the end of the track. There’s a surprisingly large amount of scenery and offsled, and surprisingly low amount of glorification of the grind. This isn’t to say there weren’t parts of this piece that were likely tedious and time-consuming, but there’s an understanding that these things don’t necessarily make something good. Above all, the guiding principle of RUSH E, the question that keeps being returned to, is, “is it funny, though?” It’s an approach that has served them well, because it absolutely is.
🙌

Just Far Enough - John

Guest review by Ava Hofmann:

In a way you’ll never understand
I’ll never say
I—

And then John’s laptop slams shut. And then the video ends.

When I first watched this, the sudden snap of this ending sent a jolt of surprise through my body. The lilting piano melodies and cryptic writing of the preceding minute had lulled me into false sense of calm and curiosity. All of that ended with what felt like a slap in the face. And I know that I’m not the only one who felt that way.

John’s Just Far Enough synthesizes several elements from other Line Rider tracks in order to allow it to creatively enter into previously unexplored emotional registers. Consider, for example, the recording method: similar to last year’s Descenso del Monte Raescaestrellas, the track is filmed via an external camera pointing at the computer screen rather than exported directly from Line Rider. The emotional content of this formal move, however, is entirely different: the skewed and low-quality footage of Descenso created a warped, disturbing feeling—an intimacy that was too close and too overwhelming, like painful memories. Just Far Enough, however, exploits the element of intimacy of external screen recording towards new emotional ends: the camera, which is placed at a slightly further distance, offers us a glimpse of the creator’s life at a more human scale, offering a more cozy (albeit distanced) view of their space. We see the creator’s desk and supplies, their wall art and math homework, a Pokémon card and a well-cared-for cactus. We are offered this vulnerable look into the actual room in which the track was made, and get glimpses of this other person’s life and way of living.

This is emphasized by the track’s movement and writing, pulling from the expressive and personal tradition of trackmaking pioneered by other Line Rider creators like Branches/Jade, vsbl, and myself. Like many of Jade’s tracks, it feels written to or about someone in particular, about a specific moment in this person’s life. The “sloppy” flatsled music sync also manages to feel personal and subtle, due in part to the unapologetic way the creator’s own technical inexperience and limitations are leveraged to create a thoughtful piece—although John has stated elsewhere that they made the track at a time when they were unaware of how to export Line Rider tracks as video, they took this as an opportunity to make a track that could only be made by externally recording their computer screen. Similarly, John’s very beginner-level music sync underscores this element of vulnerability in the track: would you be willing to share your art online with others as new beginner? How would you feel doing so? Although not technically “perfect”, John is drawing on their low level of expertise confidently, making a track that could ONLY be made while just starting out on their Line Rider journey.

And so, for a single minute, we are let into the head, heart, and space of the track’s creator. However, this is all to set us up for that gut-punch of an ending: the laptop slamming shut. This is not the too-close vulnerability of Descenso, but it is not an uncritical vulnerability: it is a distanced one. We do not actually know John. We only have a brief glimpse of their space at a specific time. We do not know why, exactly, they made this track. And this is, in fact, what the track is about: the unknowable emotional distances that exist between us all.

Look again at the writing:

In a way you’ll never understand
I’ll never say
I—

Each line demonstrates a different kind of refusal of understanding:

• The first line is about the incapacity of the “you” to understand—what? It’s unclear. There are probably a few good guesses one could make about this “what” the track talks around—a crush, an identity, or an apology—but this is the point: the “you” is not told. It/they/we cannot understand.

• The second line underscores the way the “I” is unwilling to articulate the “what” of the track. The communication breakdown is, in a sense, a two-way problem: “you” cannot understand and “I” will not explain. If we read across these two lines as if they are one sentence, we get additional wrinkles to this dynamic: there is also something incomprehensible for the “you” about the way in which the “I” will not communicate with the “you”.

• The final line sets itself up as if it will be the admission of the “what” of the track—reading across the lines we get, “I’ll never say I—”. We are on the edge of our seats to be told what it is that “we” will never be told: “I love you”? “I’m gay/bi/trans/etc”? “I’m sorry”? We may get our hopes up that understanding between the “you” and the “I” may be possible. But this is a kind of foolishness—we already know this is something that will never be told. The laptop slams closed. The admission is shut off before it can be admitted. The vulnerability disappears in an instant, and only a strange distance remains.

Have you ever almost told someone something, and then chickened out at the last moment? Maybe you had a crush on someone and never told them. Maybe you wanted to come out to a parent or grandparent but then never did—maybe they even died before you could work up the nerve to tell them. Maybe you wanted to apologize to someone you’d burnt bridges with long ago—to pick up the pieces—but your pride got in the way. This is what this track reminds me of: the choice to not confess. That clamming up inside when you want to say something difficult; the ways we let the distance between us win. And in a final twist for Just Far Enough, by depicting that distance in such a thoughtful and sensitive and thoroughly artistic way, John manages to close that distance a little bit, allowing us to feel seen and heard in the deep, unshatterable privacy of our hearts.

For many, many years, there was a basic core assumption in the world of Line Rider that pointing a camera at your computer screen was bad - to use 2007 lingo, it was an indication of the creator being a “noob”. This is of course, understandable - in a time before widely-available screen recording software or built-in video export, pointing a cheap digital camera at your screen was simultaneously the easiest and most obvious method for putting your Line Rider creation on the internet, and also extremely likely to result in absolutely horrendous video quality, often borderline unwatchable. Even today, a surprising number of people - mostly naive children uploading large quantities of garbage in the hopes of being YouTube or TikTok famous - still make this mistake, not realizing how awful recording your computer screen typically looks.

However, in recent years, as Line Rider matures as an art medium, we’ve begun to see instances of this recording method utilized for artistic purposes. First, we had the ending of Toivo’s Line Rider Nightmare in 2019, which effectively recreated the feeling of waking up from a stress dream, as well as building a sense of tension and unease - did the nightmare stay within the Line Rider canvas, or follow us into the real world? Next, we had El Loco Invisible’s Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas in 2021, which used an uncomfortable low camera angle to create a different kind of horror - a creeping sense of unease. Now we have Just Far Enough. But this time it’s different - it’s the same medium-distance shot as Line Rider Nightmare’s ending, but instead of a messy, cramped workspace littered with empty coke cans, we see a cuter, friendlier desk space. It definitely looks lived-in (if the items on screen were curated for the camera, it’s not obvious) but there’s a painting, a cactus, a book, a cup for pencils - it’s a space full of light and color. Along with the sweet piano music and simple track, this utilizes the vulnerability inherent in this filming-the-computer technique not for purposes of horror, but to create a sense of intimacy that can then be abruptly cut off when the laptop slams shut. For such a simple concept, it’s a shockingly well-executed piece.
👍

Line Rider Race #2 - Who will survive Flight of the Valkyries? - DoodleChaos

My first thought when I saw there was a second installment of DoodleChaos’s popular 2021 release Line Rider Race was, ugh, do we really need this? Maybe I’m just wary of popular media being turned into franchises after over a decade of endless Marvel Cinematic Universe sequels and tie-ins and crossovers, but it’s a thing YouTubers do too - make a popular video one time and then do a million sequels until the end of time because it’s what gets clicks. However, Line Rider Race #2 won me over by the end, because there’s such a captivating little story told almost entirely through choreographed movement. DoodleChaos has always avoided riders ever colliding with each other directly in all of his work, and on rare occasion has created collisions between riders using invisible lines, but this is utilized extensively this time around. This is the No Country for Old Men of Line Rider.

In the first race, Yellow stole the win from Red at the last second, and while I’m not much into professional wrestling, I think this made them into what wrestling fans call a “heel”, a villainous competitor that we as the audience love to hate. This time, everyone is out for blood, with Green taking out both Yellow sledders right away. But then Blue murders green in cold blood, becoming the new villain. Then, everyone crashes and chaos ensues, with riderless sleds massacring the sledless riders, as the race becomes a free-for-all. Everyone gets their bearings again and it’s once again a neck-and-neck race between all the riders, but then as they enter the treacherous final sequence riders start getting picked off left and right. Some of them manage to get on a sled again, but this happens less and less as time goes on, until we are left with three riders - Red, Yellow, and Green - and only one sled. Yellow gets on the sled, only to be attacked by Green to lose it, not once but twice. A second sled appears and Green beats up Red to prevent them getting it, but Yellow throws that sled at Green to take them out, and steals their sled! It looks like the worst is upon us and Yellow is about to win again, but then Red sneaks in at the last second to steal the win back for Yellow! Personally I’m annoyed that Red won again (after almost winning the first race and then winning the Tandem Survival Race) , because I’m a fan of Blue, but I guess they did murder Green entirely unprovoked, and Red did take a fair amount of unprovoked abuse from Green too, so I guess fair’s fair. But Red is starting to feel like some kind of golden boy who can do no wrong, and I want to see Blue and Green get some wins in too!

You may be thinking that I have truly gone off the rails here, ranting about the intricate details of events in this piece and which sledder I think should have won this race, which was of course entirely rigged by DoodleChaos from the start. And to that I say, I think I get why people like pro wrestling now, because I would absolutely watch a soap-opera series of sledders beating each up in Line Rider no matter how many episodes there were, and I would almost certainly have strong opinions about everything. I don’t know what that says about me, so if it sounds like a cautionary tale, don’t watch this video.
👍

Old Friends (For Arglin) - gavinroo538

There’s not a whole lot to say about this one, but I think it’s still worth mentioning. It’s a touching little piece dedicated to an old friend, that deals with the impact that people have on us even if we drift apart later in life. It’s understated, and there’s not a lot to it, but it’s tastefully done. Writing out the parts of the lyrics with names and pronouns but changing them to Arglin and they/them is a good (though slightly awkward) solution to avoid any potential implied misgendering, and fading the background to black and playing clips of Arglin’s tracks on the lines “When I close my eyes / I see you” works really nicely. I particularly liked the use of the clip of the Arglin-Gavin collab Hello Hurricane where they each did half of a split-screen and, at one point, animated two halves of a heart coming together across the divide. There’s also a bit with two lines coming together that then separate, before rejoining at the end, which is some nice symbolism.
👍

Anemoia 2 - Ava Hofmann

[cw: Line Rider community drama, suicidal thoughts]

Guest review by Twig:

In the beginning there were no manuals. And then… there were manuals. And then, after a long, long time, This Will Destroy You was released. And it was from this release that an entirely new generation of Line Rider creators and enthusiasts would bloom. Some of these artists include DoodleChaos, myself, many friends from the Geometry Dash community, and Anemoia 2’s creator, Ava Hofmann.

Even though I’ve been creating in Line Rider for 4 years, this is basically the full extent of my historical knowledge in the Line Rider world - I mean, I know from video essays and discussions with community veterans the gist of how things were in 2008, but I wasn’t there to experience any of it. I never knew Line Rider existed prior to Mountain King’s release in 2017. I’ve barely even bothered to watch any tracks from that era because I found them to be wildly inaccessible… and fair enough! Tracks from the first decade of Line Rider were made under very different circumstances than today. Despite many creators pouring so much of their time and souls into ultra-precise power-quirk and dense scenery tracks, it was much harder in that era to have your emotions and personal stories represented through the track itself, both because of a lack of modern tools like music-syncing, and the gamified perspectives towards Line Rider in the central track-making community; however, it was always a tradition for creators to include drawn-out intros and credits hyping up their tracks.

I think people did this because when the tracks themselves became completely inscrutable to all but a dozen quirkers, these intros and outros were one of the last places where the creator’s feelings and personality could universally be understood, and Ava leans into this unexpected sincerity of early Line Rider intros to a maximum in Anemoia 2. I feel it is important to first note if you choose to watch Anemoia 2 that every single clip and audio sample used is from a real Line Rider video, which baffled me on first watch due to the sheer amount of seemingly unrelated edited sequences including shaky CGI space footage, a student playing Tetris on a graphing calculator, nature documentaries of the so-called “mudskipper”, and a woman in a flowing dress walking in slow-motion along a beach shoreline at sunrise. What the hell is any of this doing in Line Rider videos? Aside from our Line Rider feature film Mount Eerie, which is sampled in Anemoia 2 as a modern juxtaposition, we have never once edited any intro or credits sequence for a Line Rider video. We’ve never needed to. Everything we’ve wanted to express could be made entirely in Line Rider, but the same cannot be said about these works of the past. These intros are all important parts of the work, providing space for the creators to talk about their work, to express their feelings toward the track, and it reveals a lot about the emotional headspace of veteran Line Rider creators.

Sure, most of the editing in Anemoia 2 is meant to be extremely humourous, and it is a really funny video. But the humour is used as a way of processing deeply complicated feelings towards track-making and the community in Line Rider’s first decade. Amongst the ridiculously bombastic intro sequences, there are apologies from one creator to another, there are people repeatedly saying “this track will be my last”, and there are sequences like that from gaoyubao’s re-edit of Eden 2, compiling and reflecting on comments that brought a Line Rider creator to delete their entire channel. Ava Hofmann, a relatively recent Line Rider artist who has extensively watched old Line Rider releases, recognizes both the hilarity of a bunch of embarrassing teenagers on the internet desperately trying to blow each other’s minds, and the genuineness that motivates it too. It’s both a shitpost making fun of online community dynamics, and a love letter to those who were vulnerable enough to bring Line Rider to where it is today. A recurring 2009 clip of Hedgehogs4Me suggesting that we innovate on ideas by turning “a chain into an alt-chain” while the inspirations to Mount Eerie (all of which were released 2016 and onwards) scroll past is absurdly funny, but you have to give him credit for at least trying, for pushing to be better, even if he had no clue how.

The clips in Anemoia 2 are organized with the sensitivity of a documentary maker, piecing together archaic pre-existing footage in inventively cohesive ways to reveal a larger story, one about community, told from an observer’s perspective, and yet it all gets brought back beautifully to Ava’s feelings of gratitude as she holds back from showing any actual Line Rider track footage until the very end of the 38-minute runtime when an excerpt from Three Memories of Snow plays, a track Ava made about her earliest memories of making art in Line Rider. Over this, an excerpt of Bevibel Harvey’s I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You Line Rider In-Depth video essay plays:

This show didn’t just bring tears to my eyes - I was openly weeping. I felt somehow validated, like the show itself was saying to me, wordlessly, “I see you. I see the work that you do. I see the magic that you make happen.” And I turn, tears streaming down my face, a total blubbering mess, to my partner at the time, Katie Martin, who I was seeing the show with, and she has this slightly confused look on her face.

“Wow,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes, “that was amazing.”

She looks back at me, a little embarrassed.

“Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t really get it.”

This story Bevibel is sharing is originally about a live show revealing the backstage emotions of theatre technicians, but in the context of Anemoia 2, this speech is solely about Line Rider. And you could interpret “this show” as Bevibel responding to watching Anemoia 2, like a lone viewer in an empty theatre, but I think “this show” is referring to something much larger. As every single inspiration to This Will Destroy You slowly scrolls by, each one being thanked in the same way that coaster3000 was thanked by Hedgehogs4Me “for making [him] annoyed all the time” a decade prior, I interpret that Bevibel, as someone who has been such an integral part of the evolution of Line Rider, is referring to the “show” that is their own life: the humbling experience of even having the opportunity to be alive and engaged in a story that keeps changing wildly in new directions and producing deeply personal art.

But then, there’s the part about Katie - the seemingly out-of-place woman in the dress walking along the shoreline in the early morning - and this part hits me hard because it reminds me that it’s impossible for everyone to understand what you’re doing in the world of art, and it’s clear this is something that early Line Rider creators grappled with deeply. Even as their work grew more and more inscrutable, they still felt a desire to be understood, and that desire is reflected in those overly-dramatized intros. The miles of dedications, explanations and apologies in the credits reveal that really what they wanted was to connect with those around them. Connection, for me at least, is an uncomfortable thing, but we laugh when we’re uncomfortable, and we laugh when we are faced with unexpected sincerity. Laughter is a powerful tool, especially for coming to terms with a difficult past, even if it’s a past you never experienced. So let us laugh at the past, for it is not a demeaning expression, but a release of gratitude - an uncontrollable appreciation for the absurdity of how far we’ve come, and how far we’ll inevitably continue to go.

I’m extremely glad Twig wrote a guest review for this one, because despite the fact that my involvement in this piece was largely limited to providing a lengthy list of releases with unhinged intros and credits sequences on Ava’s request (having no idea what this project was going to be at the time) and losing my mind laughing every time I watched an in-progress version, it feels uncomfortably close for me to write a review about it. Not only do I know and remember the deeply serious emotional context for every single clip utilized - some of these clips are gut-punch one-shot psychic-damage KOs for me - but I made a large portion of them - some when I was a nerdy teenager trying to prove something, and others when I was much older and had gotten a handle on why Line Rider meant so much to me, and how it might mean something to others. With this level of context, this piece is still absurdly surreal, but in a way that’s probably completely different from the experience of most. Some jump-cuts skip from 2008 to 2020, to 2012, back to 2020, then to 2010, then back to 2020 again, which is deeply bizarre in a way that’s hard to articulate. To Ava, everything before 2017 might feel like ancient history, but 2007 and 2015 were eight years apart, and if you consider the fact that Mountain King is only five years old, it might start to become clear how viscerally enormous these jumps in time feel to me. It made me think about how history is flattened over time, how a entire decade of events becomes compressed into one vague “era” of time the further away from it we move. The pre-DoodleChaos decade increasingly feels like a single era of Line Rider, but in 2015 it felt like there had been dozens of eras. Heck, in 2007 it felt like there had already been several “eras” even though Line Rider was still less than a year old - In 2022 I still think about people like Chih and anomaly76 as the “old guard” who started playing long before I did, even though I started playing Line Rider less than 6 months after it was released, and so they only started a few months before me. Time is so weird, y’all.

The comedy of Anemoia 2, though, is absolutely on point for me. It turns out that superimposing clips of deeply self-serious extended credits sequences on top of each other is extremely funny, for example, as is playing an incredibly hype intro buildup to a drum and bass drop where the track starts, only to cut away at the last second to footage of a BBC documentary of the mudskipper, a fish that can walk on land that looks absolutely ridiculous. Many of the edits had me laughing out loud upon first watch, for reasons that would be impossible to describe without rambling here for thousands of words about stuff that very few people are interested in (and frankly, that nobody should be interested in). It’s this comedy, though, that really sells the unexpectedly sincere ending of this piece for me. Even more difficult to describe than the surrealism of juxtaposing all these clips is the feeling of hearing my own voice describe my own dark-night-of-the-soul crisis around Line Rider in 2016-2017 in an excerpt from my 2021 video essay, while the credits sequence to This Will Destroy You that I made in the midst of that crisis in 2017 roll past, superimposed by the land acknowledgement of Branches’ 2022 release Mount Eerie - the track that, more than any other, made all of that struggle worth it to me. My experience with this piece is not remotely universal, and I’m not even sure how I would attempt to describe it, but it was deeply meaningful to me, and I’m grateful for that.
👍

Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1 - Ava Hofmann

In April 2007, less than two months after coining the term “gravity wells” with a track release named after them, anomaly76 released Absurd!st Movement Pt.1, described by its creator as “a quirky, grinding abstract affair”. Widely regarded as Line Rider’s first scened quirk, Absurd!st Movement was a seminal work that created a unique feeling upon first release that has proved difficult for other artists to recapture over the following 15 years. (Wow did that sentence make me feel old…) It might be hard for most people reading this to imagine a time when quirk was barely three months old, so it’s important to explain that quirk was understood at this time as bouncing Bosh around in unpredictable, “quirky” ways with (relatively) small lines, and was not yet the most popular, dominant, or celebrated style of track. The most popular tracks had scenery, loops, and perhaps manuals, and quirk was this hot new thing that everyone was trying out, but the power-metal manuquirk of Z_N-Freak had not yet taken the Line Rider community by storm. Naturally, everyone was wondering how one might go about scening a quirk. Absurd!st Movement was anomaly76’s brilliant answer to this question on everyone’s minds. If you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly seen an enormous amount of highly refined uses of gravity wells even if you don’t know their names - flings and chains and flanuals and grolls - but in April 2007, none of that existed yet. Gravity wells looked bizarre, glitchy, alien, and strangely different from standard sledding. Before people had the technical literacy to understand how gravity wells might typically affect Bosh, scening over them with M.C. Escher-style optical illusions in Absurd!st Movement combined abstract mind-bending visuals with abstract, mind-bending, unpredictable movement to create an abstract, mind-bending piece of art. But it was only something that could be done once - which is likely why that second installment teased in the title never arrived. Once people understood how gravity wells worked better, if you wanted to achieve that effect again, you would have to come up with something new.

Many people have tried to recapture this effect since, and many have succeeded in various ways, from Flashkick’s integration-fakeouts to Interrobang’s faux-quirk dots, but nobody seems to have realized the potential for this sort of mind-bending effect with .com’s invisible layers - until now, that is. Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1 mostly features lines that Bosh interacts with in ways that are bizarre and unpredictable even in 2022 - because much of the “track” you can see is actually fake (as in, it was drawn around Bosh’s movement afterward with green lines), and the real track is invisible, which is made especially confusing with the help of the new custom-gravity feature applying low gravity in an upward direction (though it might take the viewer a while to figure out that that’s what’s going on, which is why the whole thing feels, well, surreal). Starting from this premise, it then incorporates remounts, fake manuquirk, a fake kramual made of pencil scribbles, and stuttering time remapping. It’s a piece dense with micro-jokes for people who know how Bosh typically interacts with a Line Rider track, constantly trying to subvert your expectations in new and ever-weirder ways. You know Bosh is going to interact with the lines you’re seeing, but it’s impossible to predict how those interactions will go. To top it all off, everything is covered in minimalist abstract scenery in a so-horribly-clashing-it’s-funny pink-on-yellow color scheme that sets the appropriate tone - this is a silly piece, designed to tickle your funny bone.

Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1 is described by its creator as “an inadequate homage", but I disagree. I think this track absolutely captures the spirit of Absurd!st Movement, shepherding the original philosophy of quirk into the modern era and expanding and improving on it by playing up its humorous qualities. What better way to bring back the original spirit of quirk than with hilariously bizarre misdirectional movement covered in minimalist, abstract scenery in an eye-strain-inducing color scheme? Surreal!st Movement, Pt. 1 is the first Line Rider piece I’ve seen in a long time that got me to laugh by toying with my expectations of Bosh’s movement, and it continued to do so throughout the piece. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not doing that much more than Absurd!st Movement - it’s not going to make you cry, or give you catharsis, or teach you something important, or cause any kind of dramatic revelation. It’s not going to revolutionize Line Rider either, as it’s not a very accessible piece (the jokes only work if you’ve watched enough movement-based Line Rider tracks to have expectations about how Bosh is going to interact with lines), but it’s very possible you’ll enjoy it nonetheless. I’d be surprised if anyone laughs as hard as I did though, so I’m biased. That’s what you call playing to the judge, folks.
👍

Alleyboss - CrazyGameMaster

I’m just gonna come right out and say it: Alleyboss has some of the most impressive handling of more than 3 riders that I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe this is CrazyGameMaster’s first .com release, because the remounting and multi-rider choreography is, dare I say it, on par with DoodleChaos and Matthew Buckley’s best work. Keeping multiple riders on screen at once is a challenge all by itself, but CGM has three, four, five riders weaving in and around each other, all syncing to different voices in the song with incredible precision. It’s not as satisfyingly well-structured as something like Matthew Buckley’s Summer/Storm, and it doesn’t have the dramatic tension and comedy of Line Rider Race, but the precision of the sync is at least on par with both of these, if not exceeding them. The biggest reason it’s less memorable than either of these, at least for me, is that it’s all set to a song by Waterflame (who is apparently still cranking out music that sounds like it would be the hottest thing on Newgrounds in 2009), while adding nothing to the music beyond precisely synced choreography. In 2022, you can give me the most impressively precise multi-rider sync I’ve ever seen, but it’s not gonna be worth all that much to me if that’s all you’re bringing to the table.
🤷

Want You Gone - A Portal 2 Line Rider Adventure - John Gerken

[cw: Portal 2 spoilers]

Ever since Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1 came out in 2007, it’s been a popular Line Rider track concept to have Bosh traverse a well-known video game. Sometimes astounding amounts of detailed scenery work have been put into them, such as Sorvius’s 2020 release Sonic Rider. HypersonicPineapple’s January release Pigstep (which the YouTube Algorithm gods have recently smiled upon) took a more fast-paced, music-synced, story-focused approach to depicting the entirety of Minecraft’s core story. The most recent installment in this tradition is Want You Gone, which see Bosh sledding through the plot of the 2011 game Portal 2. While not the first Line Rider video inspired by the Portal series, Want You Gone is the first to depict progression through the story of a Portal game, rather than just a track synced to appropriate music with some drawings of things from the game floating in space. It’s not quite like Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1’s near-identical replication of the iconic first level of the 1985 game Super Mario Bros. - which wouldn’t really possible for a 3D game anyway - but it’s surprisingly detailed and accurate in its depictions of the levels of Portal 2 while, like Pigstep, still covering the entire game in a little over two minutes, complete with some music syncing.

So, it is any good? Well, if you’re a big fan of Portal 2 you’ll absolutely enjoy it. The level of detail put into depicting individual levels in the scenery alone is impressive, and it’s not hard to follow exactly where we are in the game at any point in the track. In my opinion, the movement is excellent - it’s just as synced as Pigstep, and stikes a good balance of fast-paced and dynamic without ever drawing the focus away from Bosh’s traversal through the game, like Pigstep’s distracting alt-flings and extreme speed did on occasion. However, I do have some critiques. One nitpick is that the camera zoom feels uncomfortably close throughout, which fails to convey the sense of scale in some of the physically larger areas in the bowels of the building in the game Portal 2 itself. But my biggest gripe is that, with all the details put into recreating each room and area in the game, the stuff that made Portal 2 itself fun - the mechanics, the characters, and the story beats - are all completely absent. Where are the tractor beams, the lasers, the frictionless gel paint, the portals? Where is our bitterly furious potato-GLaDOS grudgingly giving you tips, Wheatley raving about terrible ideas in a british accent, Cave Johnson apologizing for doing wildly unethical science in the 50s? These are the things I remember about Portal 2, not the layout of each individual level. To me, the best part of Want You Gone is the titular never-gets-old song “Want You Gone”, which GLaDOS sings over Portal 2’s credits, having experienced just enough of a change of heart to let Chell (the player) out of the facility instead of trying to kill her, while remaining deeply conflicted about how she feels about it all. It’s very funny and a little sad, and I love it - which begs the question, if the part I like most about a Line Rider track is the song, what does that say about the track?

I think the best moment in the track itself is when Bosh is launched to the moon and back - depicting the moment in the final battle when Chell puts a portal on the moon to kill Wheatley. It’s a very funny and unexpected moment in the game, and it’s also funny and unexpected in the Line Rider track itself. But the part I really remember about that moment is the “wait what” moment when GLaDOS saves Chell’s life instead of killing her along with Wheatley, and then the tension of trying to figure out why she did it and what she wants to do with you now in the cutscene that follows. In the end, while I don’t think Want You Gone is a bad track by any means, it’s just not that memorable - which is perhaps fitting, since after all, in the end it’s a tribute to a game John Gerken loved. It was never going to be as good as the real thing.
🤷

Kiss From a Rose - John Xue

[cw: flashing images]

This one’s one of those classic all-over-the-place releases, similar to gavinroo538’s Innuendo, or to use a more recent example, StackBabber’s Fred Astaire. There’s a lot of experimentation with a vast array of ideas and techniques in Kiss From a Rose, drawing on a wide variety of influences without any clear structure or consistent theme. If I was in a cynical mood I might call it “unoriginal” or “incoherent”, and if I was in an optimistic mood I might call it “entertaining” and “unpredictable”. As always, there’s some ideas that I really like - standout moments are a lovely drawing of a lighthouse by the sea, a kramual into a raised fist as the music drops out, an animation of three “I”s that spin to become horizontal lines that the title is then written out on, and of course the final drawing of a single rose illuminated in the dark by a lone streetlight. There are other aspects that didn’t work for me though, like the Line Rider Advanced pencil live-draw effect that I’m going to call “overplayed” for lack of a better term. Others were just confusing, such as a bizarrely-stylized drawing of some kind of pixel-art noir detective for the lyric “the dark side of me”. Some even landed as (I assume) unintentional comedy, such as the recurring lyric “my eyes become large” being literally depicted with increasingly absurdly enormous eyes. It’s not bad by any means, but for everything I like about it, there’s something else that doesn’t do it for me - for example, the movement maintains a consistent sense of flow (without any sudden jarring direction changes) that matches the song quite well, but, like a lot of LRA releases, it all feels a bit too fast for a track synced to a song that is more of a ballad than anything else. Your mileage may vary with this one. You might like it, but it’s probably not going to blow your mind.
🤷

If I Had a Mountain - Interstellar_1

There are definitely things I like about If I Had a Mountain. Zero-gravity physics works well for the song’s floaty ethereal quality, there’s some cool abstract representation of the “pieces” in the lyrics as floating triangle glass shards, and there’s clearly thought put into the structure of the song, with Bosh going faster during the choruses and slower during the verses. The scribbled-pencil lyrics, thoughtful structure, and zero-gravity physics all culminate really beautifully with Bosh’s passage through a tunnel of scribbles in zero-gravity while the emotionally-charged lyrics of the bridge are written out in extra-squiggly all-caps that really sell the moment as heartfelt.

However, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, there’s also a lot of If I Had a Mountain that doesn’t work for me. There are parts, where Bosh passes through the same space multiple times, when lots of lyrics are on screen at once and Bosh’s trajectory makes the order in which they are intended to be read difficult to parse. The words in the choruses are so small, and fly past so quickly, that reading them creates a fair amount of eyestrain, something that works against the breezy feeling much of the track creates. And while zero-gravity fits the song nicely, it’s clear that Interstellar_1 isn’t sure how to fully utilize it. There’s a reliance on horizontal pinches for speeding up and slowing down and multilined acceleration lines to change Bosh’s trajectory, and while there’s nothing wrong with simple building blocks, there’s generally not much thought put into how to utilize them - how Bosh’s physical interaction with the track should feel in different parts of the piece. This doesn’t require a whole lot of consideration under standard gravity - if you don’t touch Bosh for a while they will start accelerating downward, so in order to do anything interesting you typically need Bosh to collide with lines - but in zero-g virtually all contact with lines is optional. Without input, Bosh will continue straight in any direction, at the same speed, forever. This is utilized really well in the bit with the tunnel, where Bosh is left untouched for long stretches without being affected by gravity, but other than raw speed, it doesn’t really contrast with any of the movement in the rest of the track, which really robs it of its oomph. Contrast this with (the opening half of) Xavi’s Space Mountain, which uses essentially the same techniques to create a much more dynamic zero-g experience. I’m also generally disappointed with the lack of environments. Not that we needed anything overly detailed - the simple triangle shards are serviceable, and the scribbled tunnel works great - but there are long stretches of track where all we see is Bosh floating past lyrics, sometimes the exact same lyrics we’ve already seen before, presented in exactly the same way.

Let’s zoom out for a second. There’s a singular focus in If I Had a Mountain on the lyrics of the titular Ok Go song - sometimes it’s virtually all that’s happening on the screen, and they’re all stylized pretty simply, so it feels like the primary goal of the piece is showcasing these lyrics. So what are they about?

“If I Had a Mountain” is a brief but emotional climax to Ok Go’s 2014 album “Hungry Ghosts”, a concept album about the ups and downs of a relationship. Positioned after the almost comically bombastic “The One Moment” (“And this will be / The one moment that matters at all”) and before the moody “The Great Fire” (“But when the flames die down / And everything is gone / Will there be fire / Under the ashes still?”), “If I Had a Mountain” is an understated, yet passionate plea that the relationship might be saved somehow (though from what is left ambiguous). The song juxtaposes breathtakingly grandiose imagery of mountains, deserts, and oceans:

And if I
Had an ocean
The waves would reach past the shore
And if I
Had a desert
The sand would be whiter than snow

With tiny but significant moments in the relationship, to emphasize the emotional devastation of its potential end:

But a book abandoned by the bed might kill me
The stain from where your wine glass was
Could bring me to my knees
A book abandoned by the bed might kill me
If I, I don't have you

This culminates in the bridge, a sweeping romantic declaration that makes up the tunnel sequence in Interstellar_1’s track:

Cause everything that I am
Is just pieces of you
And every thought that I have
Just pieces of you
Just pieces of you
Just pieces of you
Yeah
Just pieces of you

On the one hand, I don’t understand how you make a Line Rider track to a song with imagery this potent and not even attempt to represent or depict any of it! The whole purpose of the song is to craft powerful imagery that pulls at your heartstrings! Where is the vastness of the mountains and oceans? Where is the devastation of the micro-moments of the lost relationship - book, the wine stain, the bed?

On the other hand, I personally find these kinds of sweeping romantic gestures a bit… troubling. I know this kind of sentiment is virtually ubiquitous in pop music, but “Everything that I am is just pieces of you” sounds to me like a statement by someone who has put waaay too much stock into a single relationship, and I don’t think that’s only because I’m polyamorous. Everyone needs a community of people around them who can provide support in different ways at different times, because, no matter who you are or how much you love your wife, putting all your eggs in one basket like that is precarious. A single event (such as a sudden death or illness) can remove your entire support system overnight, leaving you utterly adrift. A life like this goes hand-in-hand with a deep fear of something going wrong, which can cause all sorts of difficult issues. So maybe it’s ok that this track doesn’t capture the sentiments of the song as well as it could, because that might have done more harm than good.
🤷

---

Thanks for reading!

Line Rider Review YouTube Channel
Support the Line Rider Artists Collective on Ko-Fi
Apply to Join the Line Rider Artists Collective
Support Bevibel Harvey (Rabid Squirrel) on Patreon