August 2025 Line Rider Roundup
Welcome back to Line Rider and her roundup! We’re still stuck in August 2025, but instead of being stuck in the two-day confinements of Track Jam 2025 and making a special roundup for that Track Jam, we have now broadened our horizons to a comfortable one-month cozy studio apartment, just like how it was before doing the Track Jam 2025 roundup! Hopefully at some point soon, we’ll break into September’s humble abode to release the September 2025 roundup!
Silliness aside, I’m glad that I decided to make a special roundup dedicated to the Track Jam 2025 tracks, because besides those tracks, there are still several tracks released in August 2025 that deserved to have a review, and a review they shall get! With that said, huge thanks to Bevibel and MoonXplorer for always returning to write reviews for these roundups, and another huge thanks to Nghi Nguyen for their first-ever appearance in the Monthly Roundups! He would like to introduce himself here:
Hi round-up readers! I came into the LR world by the good graces of Jade / Branches, my very very beautiful friend of many years. I study both ecology and English, and my work focuses on the intersections of land, language, and people. As a student of literature, the art criticism space sometimes is more exciting to me than the primary works themselves, because Words, which Do Many Things—if they are precise and careful—help shine light onto places we might never even think to look. I hope my contributions to the round-up helps you to walk bravely and boldly into that unexplored terrain.
Let us commence forth with the reviews!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Sad Machine - Malizma
[cw: intrusive thoughts]
Review by Bevibel:
I’ve never been a Line Rider developer. I imagine it must be pretty thankless work – Line Rider is a deceptively complicated program these days, there’s rarely any money in it, and it seems like a lot of it is layers of hacks on hacks on hacks. There are also decades of controversies around design choices, not to mention many wildly different playstyles and multiple competing versions, so any major choices you make (and sometimes even minor choices) are likely going to upset somebody, somewhere, somehow. As someone who’s no stranger to administrative work, which I imagine to be spiritually similar, it’s not a surprise to me that there’s a long history of developers either burning out and quitting suddenly, or slowly receding from the community until they disappear off the face of the earth. The history of Line Rider development has usually involved an extremely small group of people – often a single person, rarely more than two or three at a time – dedicating countless hours to a project for, frankly, no good reason. It’s honestly a miracle that Line Rider even has a development history, let alone one that has been more or less continuous and largely unbroken since Boštjan stopped in 2007.
Early in 2025, this history was documented by September in this amazing diagram that somehow has not yet been mentioned in the roundups, so I’m just going to leave it here for reference:
And yet, literally none of the tracks that have been written about on this blog since this roundup began would exist without these community developers, none of whom have ever been adequately compensated for their time, and most of whom have made virtually no money at all from their efforts. It’s a terrifying thought to realize that literally everything that we have ever written about rests on a foundation that is perpetually hanging by a thread and might not have existed at all, which is why I throw a few dollars at Malizma’s Ko-fi every month, and encourage everyone reading this who has any amount of income to click on that link and do so as well.
With allllllll of that out of the way, let’s talk about Malizma’s track Sad Machine! (Published on YouTube as U0FETUFDSElORQ== on a second channel) Set to Porter Robinson’s “Sad Machine”, the track begins as a sort of autobiographical trip through Malizma’s initial growth as a creator, and then shifts into a sequence of GitHub commits and Discord message notifications as the music chants “WE DEPEND ON YOU”, before exploding at the drop into a blizzard of features, mods, trackmaking tools, and little bits and pieces of things people have made with them. After an interlude for us to catch our breath, the second chorus begins, with seemingly an exact copy of the imagery of the first chorus except this time it has been partially erased, as red text scrawled over the top depicts a kind of anxiety meltdown around Malizma’s insecurities and frustrations with Line Rider development. The second drop approaches — we build up to it, and build up to it, and then the video abruptly ends.
It’s striking to me that I am pretty sure that this is the only Line Rider track that is about the development of Line Rider itself. I’m really impressed at how well it conveys the hours of thankless labor, the immensity of the feedback (positive and negative) from the community, and the inner turmoil that nobody else can really understand or relate to. Putting most of the visuals in Line Rider itself but keeping most of the robot lyrics in a screen-recorded console command line is a beautiful touch, constantly reminding the viewer that all the visuals of Line Rider development are being created using Line Rider itself. I also really like that the video cuts off before the second drop, resisting the pull towards some kind of cathartic resolution and instead leaving us hanging. I feel like any kind of attempt at a conclusion would feel speculative and potentially even dishonest, like forcing narrative closure onto one’s actual life when, in reality, the core issue remains unresolved. To me, the ending seems to say, however this goes from here depends on the Line Rider community. Do we have the ability, capacity, and willingness to support and take care of each other?
Considered from this perspective, it’s really striking how direct Sad Machine feels, in a way that Line Rider tracks seldom are, because it’s very much about Line Rider itself and its community. It tackles serious issues that directly affect all of us, issues within our community that we can actually do something about, and then refuses to give us a conclusion. If we want a happy ending, we’ll have to create it ourselves, and it’s up to all of us to give Sad Machine the best ending we can.
I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU - Place holder
[cw: flashing images, anti-queer online abuse]
Review by Bevibel:
My first watchthrough of I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU involved a lot of me grinning ear-to-ear and saying things like, “Oh this rules!” and, “Oh yeah, I am digging this!” The artist formerly known as william017 and currently known as “Place holder” has the ability to create an extremely unique sort of video-art fusion of Line Rider and Geometry Dash, one which never really worked for me when I watched similar previous works like Montreal or Glass Beach. But watching I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU, a music video set to the entirety of Black Dresses’ album “Peaceful as Hell”, I felt like it finally clicked, at least on some level.
I think part of the reason why is that I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU has a relatively toned-down and grounded opening, easing me into things like pulsing rainbow neon and lyrics added in post-production, before exploding into a deluge of flashy visual ideas. The opening five and a half minutes also has some of the strongest material, such as a memorable moment with dozens of sledders flying across a screen covered mostly by fire and lyrics like “DIE FOR REAL”. Another part of it is that I think the glitchy, kitschy, experimental electro-industrial music of Black Dresses is by far the best musical fit for Place holder’s chaotic visual style. And my last guess at why this stuff suddenly started making sense to me is that there is rarely a major distinction between Line Rider and Geometry Dash footage in terms of visual intensity. I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU frequently employs numerous video layers and eye-wateringly intense effects, and this is true of the Line-Rider-heavy sections as much as the Geometry-Dash-heavy sections. In other works that mix these two particular video game art mediums, sections with Geometry Dash footage often feels visually much busier than more-minimalist Line Rider sections, but Place holder has no shortage of rainbow-strobe Line Rider moments, as well as relatively bare-bones Geometry Dash sections. Of course, “bare bones” Geometry Dash generally still involves a bunch of pre-made graphics, that generally clash pretty bad with the digital-drawing aesthetic of Line Rider, but Place holder’s tactic of smothering it all in buckets of effects and coming up with something entirely different to put on the screen every few seconds does a lot to equalize the footage.
On the other hand, that’s sort of the problem here as well. It seems that Place holder was so busy constantly coming up with new ideas for face-melting effects that they forgot that what a longform piece really needs to be memorable are things like themes, motifs, or callbacks. You know — things that make it feel like a complete work instead of a random potpourri of ideas. Unfortunately, Place holder seems downright allergic to reusing a single idea in the entire 47-minute video — not only do they avoid reusing any of their strongest visual ideas, they don’t even re-use a single font, instead opting to pick a new one for just about every song, sometimes even using more than one within a single song! This fear of reusing anything at all means that much of I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU is visually dazzling on first watch, but difficult to remember, and even more difficult to parse any actual meaning from. For me, watching sections “PLEASE BE NICE” and “CREEP U” mostly bring to mind the other tracks set to those songs — PLEASE BE NICE by Ray and Do I Creep You Out? by Autumn respectively, both tracks with a much more distinctive and cohesive visual aesthetic — to the point that I find myself picturing them in my head while watching Place holder’s visualizations, something I cannot say has ever happened the other way around, even though Autumn’s track was released months later. (I am writing this review in January 2026, for the record.) It’s stylistically one-of-a-kind and visually intense like nothing else in Line Rider, but it starts to get stale when you realize that it’s just a million ideas thrown at the wall without any awareness of what’s working, and after about 20-30 minutes of that it starts to feel rather tired. It’s a shame, because many of these visual “scenes” are brilliant - like the bit with the bridge-like arches in “MAYBE THIS WORLD IS ANOTHER PLANETS HELL?” (which reminded me of the sunset sand-surfing scene from the game “Journey”), or the part in “ANGEL HAIR” that feels like some kind of glitched-out VHS vaporwave nightmare. Unfortunately, both of them only happen once, are over quickly, and are never revisited or iterated on. And, as mentioned earlier, most of the strongest moments are near the start — I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU gradually loses steam as it goes.
It’s also worth noting that, despite this being a 47-minute video that had to take many, many hours to create, it’s unclear if I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU has anything to say, or even anything about what the process of creating it might have meant for its creator. There are hints here and there, such a the grave with “william” on it in “PLEASE BE NICE”, and some screenshots of (deeply upsetting) discord messages bashing queer people in “DAMAGE SUPPRESSOR”, but these are brief moments in a video that largely feels like an album-length abstract visualizer. Ultimately, I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU is an incohesive but visually stunning and wholly unique work, bursting with creative visual ideas. It’s definitely worth checking out, but I wouldn’t be all that surprised if your eyes start glazing over some way into its lengthy runtime.
Twelve Variations on "Bosh Falls Down a Cliff": An Exploration of the Track Alignment Chart. - Roaxial
Review by Bevibel:
Every time I’ve watched Twelve Variations on “Bosh Falls Down a Cliff” my primary reaction is uncontrollable laughter that starts about 30 seconds in and pretty much doesn’t stop for the entire rest of the track, unless I’m pausing to make various exclamations of excitement and/or delight. I don’t know how much this is due to the specific types of brainworms I have from almost certainly having watched more Line Rider tracks than anyone else on Earth, or my particular sense of autistic humor that delights in seeing iterations on a basic concept, and how much is that Twelve Variations is just that funny. I have to strain my memory to think of a track that I have laughed this much at. Ragdoll is the only point of comparison that comes to mind, and that track is nearly a decade old!
What is a Line Rider track, anyway? This question has been hotly debated over the years, ever since people first started using video editing to do things that were impossible in raw Line Rider. In recent years, this has been the basis for tons of creative videos that push the boundaries of “Line Rider track” into the realm of video art, which has been largely a delightful time, and also for silly shitposts such as September Hofmann’s Track Alignment Chart. Twelve Variations on “Bosh Falls Down a Cliff” uses this chart as a jumping-off point to create a series of short clips that may or may not count as Line Rider tracks, depending on where your personal definition falls. However, one need not know anything about the history of this debate, or even know what the Track Alignment Chart is, to appreciate Twelve Variations, because the video itself is largely self-explanatory.
Fortunately, what could have been a rather dry affair is instead a series of wacky renditions of a simple track where Bosh sleds along, falls off a cliff, crashes into a tree, and then sleds into a house to stop seated at a table, using everything from Blender to ASCII to Microsoft Paint to photos of drawings in colored pencil. There’s even a version that is recreated with real-world physics, a version where events are described with (extremely dramatic) voice-to-text, and a version created entirely by editing together clips from the TV show “Family Guy”. The clips are ordered in a way that creates excellent pacing, and wildly disparate music choices and all-around fantastic comedic timing make the whole affair feel like a cohesive experience rather than a sequence of disconnected clips. Plain and simple, it’s a great time!
And no, I cannot believe that the funniest and most stylistically creative track I’ve watched in years was made by Roaxial, whose work I’ve rarely had anything nice to say about in these roundups in the past. After a couple of years making tracks like Manual Short 7 and decent music visualizers like Fallen Skies, and then several years making nothing at all, Twelve Variations makes me excited to see if Roaxial has more in store for us. I sure hope so! If it’s even half as creative and entertaining as Twelve Variations it’ll be well worth watching.
Lifelike - avery
Review by Bevibel:
Finally a track for everyone who watched We’ll Never Have Sex and vocal/nonverbal and thought, “Ok, this is cool, but what if it was in 3D?” Look, I get the appeal of being able to sled through the Windows XP default desktop wallpaper, and I get the “wow” factor of rendering a Line Rider track in a lush three-dimensional environment that looks like it was made in Unreal Engine. I even get how this particular environment is tied to both the title of Porter Robinson’s song and the art for the album it opens, Nurture. But for me, it seems like it must have been a ton of work for something that falls somewhere between “neat” and “pretty”. It leaves me wondering, what’s the point of this? Why are we still stuck on depicting green grass and blue skies? Was I supposed to feel something while watching this? My favorite part of the video, to be honest, was the twinkling stars at the end. That was a really pretty and subtle effect that felt like it had a lot more potential than rendering a bajillion blades of grass in Blender.
Review by Nghi:
avery, with Lifelike and take a shower, see a therapist…, has quickly become my favourite LR creator. I watched Likelike for the first time and felt the kind of whimsical joy that only Waywardintime’s Blackbirds Sing Up at the Sun managed to reproduce in the LR medium.
Likelike has all the quiet power and beauty of a good haiku.
It’s about Bosh breaking free.
She’s first stuck in two dimensions. She goes through life as we expect her to, and she fails — she doesn’t surmount the last hill.
Then something changes, we’re not told how or why. We don’t need to, because you have gone through something like that before. You realised something huge about the world and your place in it, so either you changed yourself or the world or both. And because we’re all ever-fluid beings, we will go through that again.
Bosh changes and decides to go back to the beginning. She’s thinking, Let’s try something different this time.
The music builds. This time Bosh is thriving, you can feel it. In the background she’s remembering the 2D past. I relate to this. I ruminate on the past a lot.
And The Past fades, and boom there’s a whole world out there, bigger and more colorful than Bosh could have ever imagined. It’s windy and sunny and free. The past was lifelike, but now is life.
This exciting world fades into night, but the night is still dazzling with starlight. The sky is promising that the big world Bosh longs for will stay right there for her, but first she must rest.
I read Sabrina Imbler’s “If You Flush a Goldfish” recently. Here is my favourite passage that this track reminded me of:
[W]hen I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish [...] I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. I see a creature whose present existence must have come as a surprise even to itself. [...] A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too[.]
This breaking-free, this unimaginable coming-into the world and oneself, modeled by feral goldfish and Likelike’s Bosh—I hope this is where I find myself in the years to come.
My teacher died - Branches / Jade
Review by MoonXplorer:
When I was around four years old, I was enrolled in private music lessons so I could learn how to sing and play the piano. Along the years that I studied there, I started to have a bond with my music teacher and we became.. sort of friends, I guess? My mom kept her contact with her and I sometimes talked to her. She was also the person who discovered my pitch perfect hearing! But when we moved away, we didn’t hear a lot from her. My mom still messaged her and she would occasionally respond to her. This phrase in the track can summarize how most of the conversation went.
hey! just wondering how your summer’s been
looking forward to hearing all about that!!
The older I got, the less we kept in touch with her. Then one morning while eating breakfast, my mom looked at her phone and she gasped. She was looking at Instagram and then she said “Your music teacher died..” I didn’t really know what to say to be honest, but I was sad to hear about that. She didn’t have much family or friends, but we still checked up on her. Her last message to us was in the winter of 2024.
Jade’s track My teacher died was released in August, two months before my teacher died. When it was released, I really liked it. It reminded me of when my grandpa died as he was also a sort of mentor to me. After my music teacher’s passing, I kept coming back to this track quite a lot. It’s a very beautiful and vulnerable piece of art set to an already beautiful and vulnerable song. It spoke deeply to me.
While it explores the loss of someone you cared for, it also talks about the complex, yet bittersweet transition from relying on a singular person to carving your own path after the person’s death. It’s a mix of grief and freedom and explores how that knowledge comes from everyone instead of one singular person and that feeling only came to me after my teacher’s death
I was sorry, but I wasn’t sorry.
This track holds a special place in my heart for those reasons. It’s very devastating, but human. If I’m being honest, I’ve teared up a couple times watching it, and to me, that’s something to be proud of.
in the absence of everything, i promise to keep you warm. - MoonXplorer
Review by Autumn:
I believe this is the first Line Rider track that explicitly depicts a polyamorous relationship within the track itself. Like, I guess there are a few tracks that are probably about polyamorous relationships, but in the absence of everything, i promise to keep you warm. is the first track where I could go “okay yeah, this is definitely a track about a polyamorous relationship”. This is especially evident at the two-minute mark where we see three beings, including MoonXplorer’s kitty-sona, close together with a heart right above them. There’s not much else to say about the track besides it being about a polyamorous relationship; the three-color palette is a nice choice, the ending with the zero gravity and the visuals beside Bosh is a nice touch, and it’s overall quite cute! Not really much that stands out to me besides its subject matter. Here’s hoping we’ll see more tracks about gay polycules! :3
Diane Arbus - Place holder
Review by Autumn:
After releasing the 47-minute maximalist behemoth I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU, it seems like Place holder has no desire to take a break, because just four days after releasing that beast, they have uploaded the nearly 4-minute Diane Arbus out into the world, and it’s just as maximalist as the previous release. Before their releases I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU and Diane Arbus, it seemed like Place holder was holding back from their usual style that was well-known on their previous “william017” channel. Probably this was so they could keep their new channel a secret until I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU and dive into more experimental works such as Blues in Dallas and Experiments, 1-10. It would seem that since their release of I WILL ALWAYS BE WITH YOU and the reveal that they are the same person, they decided to return to their well-known style of combining Line Rider and Geometry Dash with a fuck ton of post-production effects.
Is Diane Arbus good though? Well, I did a bit of research, and apparently Diane Arbus is a photographer from the 20th century who became well-known for photographing people from marginalized groups and befriending those she has photographed, which I personally find to be quite interesting. Unfortunately, Place holder didn’t really seem interested in depicting much of her works or accomplishments within the track, mostly opting to just visualize the music instead. However, I do think the visualization works for me. The first half of the track consists of Line Rider and Geometry Dash footage smothered with compression, which fits well with the highly compressed music, and the second half has Place holder writing out the words of a sample of someone recalling their experiences with Diane Arbus, calling her a “mother”. At first glance, I would’ve written this off as surface-level since it doesn’t really do much beyond the written-out words, but then Place holder brought it out of surface-level by writing out the utterances of the sample and putting them in-between parenthesis, giving them emphasis (e.g. “(uhhhh)” and “(uhhm)”). This is probably my favorite part of the track, since it really shows the humanity of the person recalling their experiences.
dead end - moss7
Review by Autumn:
After releasing several tracks on their avery channel that were different from their typical moss7 work, moss7 returned to their main channel and their moss7-esque style with dead end. There are many things to like about dead end, such as the scenery of the “internal” chapter, the fast movement of the “thorns” chapter, and the poem of...well, “poem”. My favorite part has to be “thorns” with its fast movement and all the scenery that flies by, which goes well with the loud shoegaze-y part of the song. On the other hand, I wished “decoherence” was part of “thorns” and that moss7 had the capacity to scene it in the same way as “thorns”; it would’ve definitely made that part more impactful, that’s for sure! Oh well. The poem at the end was nice, even if I didn’t personally get much out of it. Overall, it’s a well-structured moss7 track that probably means something personal to moss7—especially considering that it was dedicated towards a couple specific people—but it doesn’t personally mean much to me. I still had a nice time with it!
Skeletrix Island by Twelfty
Review by Autumn:
I have NO idea what to make of this track. This track is just bizarre to me, dude. Twelfty isn’t a stranger to using post-production in his Line Rider tracks, with tracks such as from air and before abstract tech support schedule being notable examples, but it seems like Twelfty took it up a notch with his two August 2025 releases Skeletrix Island and No one will ever find (with the second track reviewed in the Track Jam special roundup). I think the track's biggest problem is that it’s really hard to figure out what Twelfty is trying to convey or even what his intentions were for this track. There were a few parts of this track that I found to be quite comedic, with the most memorable one being the diner scene with one of the two Boshes saying “i really fw you” to the other Bosh and then flying up above her seat and flailing around all in slow-motion. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to tell if any of the parts that were comedic were intended to be comedic. Not really sure what else to write about for this track that Twelfty considers to be the first “post-line rider” track, but that diner scene is gonna live rent-free in my head for a really long time.
no longer you - SALTart
Review by Autumn:
There are many things about SALTart’s debut Line Rider track no longer you that make it stand out among other debut tracks, such as the use of colors, lyrics, drawings, and storytelling. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to talk about beyond that”. Some of the most notable moments (which are also my favorites) are when the background color temporarily turns red when the lyrics says “I see your palace covered in red” and the ending with the drawn out “youuuuu”, along with the Eden 2-esque dismount that ends the track. Unfortunately, these few good moments are held back by a very zoomed-in camera that makes the lyrics and drawings fly by a bit too fast to get a good look at them, as well as a surface-level approach to the depiction of the lyrics themselves. Overall, it’s definitely a good debut track, but it isn’t anything too memorable, even compared to some other debut tracks. It’s clear to me that SALTart has a lot of potential to be a great Line Rider artist, so I can’t wait to see what tracks she decides to make in the future.
Shine - Awebud
Review by Autumn:
After a three-year absence, Awebud has returned to us with Shine, a movement-based Line Rider track with a concept that’s at the very least intriguing to me, which is syncing some slow and static movement to an ambient song that has some occasional “whooshes”. Seeing this track, I’m instantly reminded of Weightless Sledding by BlocksOn64, a track that’s also synced to an ambient song with the goal of satisfying the viewer. I’m not sure if Awebud had the intent to satisfy the viewer, but Shine unfortunately does feel like if Weightless Sledding was put on a very low budget without any of its unique animation that makes Weightless Sledding stand out. To put it simply, Shine does have a unique and intriguing concept, but the execution is very lacking, so it’s not all that memorable for me unfortunately. The ending did jumpscare me a little, so good job on that!
Field of Hopes and Dreams - myan01
Review by Autumn:
Field of Hopes and Dreams is a silly little track from myan01, released after a year of not releasing tracks. It also seems a bit experimental, with its short music visualizer section, its short animated circle section, and—my favorite part—its short combination of layer automation and independent camera section. There’s really nothing else that stands out, but I find this track to be kinda cute and it’s clear that myan01 was having fun while making this track.
Can Can - Charles and Sounds
Review by Autumn:
I don’t have much to say on Charles and Sounds’s take on “Orpheus and the Underworld” by Jacques Offenbach, but one thing that’s very notable to me is the scenery, which reminds me of the early scenery tracks from the late 2000s but put into a blender of silliness, giving it the unique semi-abstraction style that’s a little appealing. Unfortunately, that’s all this track has. The two minutes does drag on a bit, Charles makes very little effort to sync to the music, and the music itself just doesn’t fit with the whimsiness of the scenery. Still, the scenery on its own does make me wonder what else Charles and Sound could do in Line Rider.
Thanks for reading!