June 2021 Line Rider Roundup
Featuring guest reviewers OTDE, Hanuman, Ava Hofmann, and DeafTab
Welcome back! It’s been another slower month but also a really great one, with a lot of remarkable new Line Rider works. Enjoy!
Hanuman is rejoining us from last month’s roundup, and will be reviewing… well, most of the tracks in this roundup. Ava Hofmann and DeafTab are also rejoining us to write about where a garden once grew by OTDE, which seems to be quite the discussion magnet this month!
Our new guest reviewer is in fact OTDE themself, my Line Rider Review partner in crime, who you’ll know from… well, from nearly everywhere on the Line Rider Review channel, but especially for their recent video essay series Elevator Pitch. They will be reviewing Something Just Like This by Branches and Another Medium by ethanahtethan and would like to introduce themself:
Hey y’all. I’m OTDE, one of Line Rider Review’s cohosts and an avid Line Rider artist/critic, built from over a decade of obsession. I find a lot of joy in discovering the seemingly endless new ways people keep finding outlets for expression through Line Rider.
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
where a garden once grew - OTDE
Guest review by Hanuman:
where a garden once grew features stunning visuals framed by stationary camera shots that allow the viewer to really enjoy the artistic skill and labour that went into creating each scene. Whilst it certainly is lovely to look at, this work is much more than pretty lines. The two central characters in this narrative are uniquely not Bosh, but two features of scenery: the lilac bush and apple tree. Harking back to times lost, the lilac bush and apple tree discuss whether someone will finally come and build where they live, which has fallen into disrepair and isolation over the years. Although this track was intended to explore themes of “death, decay and the inexorable passage of time”, for me it leans more towards the decay and time and less the death. My first impression before reading the description was rather different:
I imagined this track referred to two people or beings, who were once part of a thriving small community or town but are now the last inhabitants. They have watched their civilisation crumble over time, seen throughout the track with visuals of ruined buildings and old signs of a settlement. As the last bastions of their civilisation, they cling to life with the hope that new people may discover them and understand why they have not left. Trees are the timeless sentinels of the forest and many old settlements, watching over as we rise and fall like ants beneath their spreading branches. So I thought the use of trees was a very apt metaphor for those whose “roots” are too deep for them to move on, as it seemed to me all the other people who left did (I didn’t assume they had died).
I found the second half of this track perplexing: a repetition of the first but slowed down, with the camera now following bosh instead of stills and with pixelated visuals. After reading the description I suppose the audio-visual distortion was added to show how even each repetition of the tree and bushes hopes can decay too, or each journey to them, or that the video itself decays, or that video itself is a fragile medium that is not immune to the ravages of time. Endless insight, arguments and conclusions can be had from this work so whilst the track itself may want to decay; I feel OTDE may have achieved the opposite in terms of post-release discussion.
Guest review by DeafTab:
I used to live in a shitty old apartment in Virginia. A lot of the rooms were very small, and there was always construction near our town, so we had to bear with all the noise pollution. After we moved, I found out that our old apartment was destroyed by a hurricane. A tree fell over and hit the house as well. I got worked up as fuck after finding that out. I was thinking about some time where I would go and visit there whenever I'm feeling sentimental or nostalgic, but there's really not a chance of that happening, now that our old apartment is destroyed at this point. The connection I have with this moment in my life and where a garden once grew is very strong in that right. There are times when you would do something in your childhood and go "Wow, this is fun"; after a few years go by, you go back to it and go "Yeah, not my thing anymore". Moments after you feel like that, something emotional hits you over the head and makes you wanna go back to what you loved doing as a child (ie: a picture book, as represented in OTDE's track). This is a wonderful depiction of this feeling. The way the scenery evokes a pastoral picture book makes me feel like someone who grew up in the country. If that's the case, then the second half represents coming back after what seems like over 20 years of being relocated. Everything is decayed, and probably on the edge of falling to dust. If anything, it's surprising how effective they pull it off with such a simple concept, but one that emotionally means a lot to me. And it's hard to come across a track that evokes that feeling so strongly.
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
OTDE continues their forays into developing inter-track meaning that began with The Road Less Travelled in their latest track, where a garden once grew, by setting essentially two versions of a track directly against each other, back-to-back. Synced to Kate Wolf’s folk-ballad The Lilac and the Apple and Dntel’s disturbing electronic remix of the same, where a garden once grew sets forward two opposed philosophies regarding one of OTDE’s major artistic concerns as of late: the way in which humanity should engage with the natural world.
The first section’s storybook-style layout and cinematography pairs extremely well with the minimalistic folk song which accompanies it, while push-and-pull movement between the two riders does well to convey the dialogic substance of the song - namely, a conversation between a lilac bush and an apple tree in an abandoned mountaintop homestead, conversing about whether anyone will return to them and take up residence again. This section operates in a deeply pastoral mode - the song and the track in this section emphasize the overlooked beauty of the natural world, and plants come to life and converse about how they wish they were under the preview of human wishes. The mode presented here is not about “real” nature, wild and tangled and endlessly complex beyond human imagining. Rather, it is a narrative about nature humans tell themselves in order to make it and their actions legible - a narrative where nature desires human influence and is a hidden wellspring of beauty, peace, and joy away from the “town in the valley below”, which seemingly keeps people from “seeing why [nature] is planted here”. It is a vision of nature where the primary purpose of nature is to have meaning and utility to humans; the possibility of nature having its own meaning is sidelined entirely. It is a story-book, after all.
The second section, then, is about the way in which, in truth, nature resists our narrativizing and has its own meanings apart from us. In this section, large sections of the scenery have been covered in static (made directly in line rider with the help of layer automation!), and the riders have been slowed down to match the Dntel remix’s distorted, glitchy reimagining, painfully stretching out the original’s snappy movement like molasses - in this version, nature, decayed, strange, and ancient, resists our desire to extract pleasure from our preconceived notions about it. The camera in this section returns to a continuous format and is zoomed out further, giving us a surreal perspective wherein the camera allows to see between and outside of the storybook’s pages, emphasizing the constructed manner of the original narrative. The second section ends with a powerful reimagining of the final vista. Before, the line “they don’t often see why we’re going here so far away” was accompanied by a detailed landscape that communicated a beauty that was being unseen due to human disconnectedness from nature. But now, in the second section, the static essentially obliterates this vista, making it hard to view. So often, we fail to see the natural world for what it is, and come to it with our narratives about it - oftentimes exploitative, anthropocentric, or just plain wrong. It is the stories that we tell - the staticky detritus of narrative that papers over our movement through the world—that prevents us for seeing its own, unique form of beauty; the static’s movement is itself beautiful, as if it were a swarm of fireflies. And static itself contains the strangeness of all the stuff that surrounds us - small snippets of the cosmic background radiation, burning away at the start of the universe. where a garden once grew asks us to see, undo our seeing, and then see again.
KSSSSHHHHHHHHHH out of ten.
Let’s start here: where a garden once grew is incredibly well crafted. In the first half, cuts between fixed-camera frames of the lyrics, surrounded by beautifully rendered pastoral scenes that two sledders ride through, give off a delightful children’s storybook vibe that feels rustic, peaceful, and nostalgic. In the second half, the exact same track is replayed to the remix of the same song, but with modifications that completely subvert the peace and simplicity of the first half. Gone are the jump cuts between fixed camera scenes, replaced with a camera following the sledders in disorientingly variable slow-motion. The beautiful drawings are now covered with animated static generated with the help of layer visibility automation functionality in the Linerider.com build. And Kate Wolf’s wholesome folk singing is now distorted and unfamiliar, mirroring the presentation of the track. What does it mean? At the risk of sounding pretentious, this is a work that is deeply meaningful and yet resists straightforward analysis and explanation. There are clear themes of juxtaposition here - childhood versus adulthood, nature versus human technology, purity versus decay, naivete versus despair - but ultimately this is a piece that is emotionally felt rather than intellectually understood, or at least that was my experience. It’s easy to wish for a time when things seemed simpler - nature, civilization, progress, art, Line Rider - and nostalgia for my naive understanding of the world as a child can be incredibly seductive at times. But when I find myself slipping into this form of nostalgia I also find myself actively forgetting that my childhood was marked by anguish, stress, disorientation, and the feeling that things just weren’t right, without any ability to comprehend or articulate what was wrong, while all the adults assured me that All of This was Right and Good and also Just How Things Are. It’s easy for me to forget that at age eight I cried myself to sleep every night for months, and how everyone assumed something was wrong with me rather than the world. My life today, as stressful and difficult as it is at times, is a hell of a lot better than that! Things never actually were simple or pure or peaceful. So when I find myself wishing for a time when they were, I am in fact longing for a constructed fantasy of the world that everyone around me gaslit me into half-believing I was in, not any life I ever actually lived. I can’t begin to pinpoint how exactly where a garden once grew reminded me of this simple and deeply personal truth about my life, because it did so on the level where, upon first watch, I felt it, deep in my chest. What I’m doing now is merely putting together some words for you to explain what I understood in that moment. It’s my opinion that any work of art that can do something like that is worthy of the highest praise.
🙌
Three Memories of Snow - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by Hanuman:
Three Memories of Snow is one of those tracks you dream of making. I think this track might break all records for “meta subversion”. Apart from the lovely cuts and camerawork of the two Boshes playing in their snowy world making and sometimes succeeding at their little jumps, we get an extremely nostalgic take on how we the creators discover line rider, expertly and simply delivered through an ingenious use of the multi-rider system. I guess I will dub this Line rider within Line rider “Bosh-ception”, “Line-ception?” This track took me back to my first experiments with Line rider and the little adventures I had with Bosh, I had a big dumb grin on my face the whole time. Thanks Ava!
My first thought, judging by the title, was that this was going to be a series of nostalgic vignettes about having fun in the snow as a kid, and while I wasn’t exactly wrong, it was so much more than that. The first two memories were, far from being fluffy feel-good Hallmark memories, filled with embarrassment, shame, and abandonment, striking painful chords in my own memories of feeling unappreciated and ostracized by others. In the first story, blue-scarf rider attempts to sled off a snow-jump that green-scarf has created, only to painfully wipe out right in front of them. I can feel blue-scarf’s sense of shame from being judged by green-scarf here even if it’s not explicitly depicted. And then, in the second story, when blue-scarf can’t make it up a slope that green-scarf has, green-scarf shrugs and abandons blue-scarf entirely, leaving them cold and alone. Blue-scarf then decides to head home on their own, presumably in a dismal mood. This is all conveyed with jump cuts between numerous different short recordings, and while this can be a little aesthetically clunky at times, Ava’s storytelling skills make the narrative easy to follow. It’s the third story, however, that takes Three Memories of Snow from a thought provoking little sketch to something really special. The third story utilizes the same jump cut editing style, while it to another level of complexity, cutting between wide shots of blue-scarf at home on the computer, to drawn close ups of the sledder’s face to show expressions, to shots of the computer screen itself. The substance of the third story will likely be intensely relatable for many Line Rider creators - seeing a TechDawg track on YouTube that inspires you to try Line Rider, only to become disappointed and frustrated when you find out just how difficult it is to make anything at all, having just picked it up for the first time. Blue-scarf abandons their computer, yet again feeling disappointed and sad at the end of the third memory. However, a final coda manages to celebrate those baby’s-first-Line-Rider creations in a way that I found genuinely touching, even as I find it difficult to describe how it managed that in words. Three Memories of Snow is a sometimes painful but also quite poignant look back on how someone might have first encountered Line Rider, touching on complex emotions around childhood memories that many people can likely relate to, even if you’re not a Line Rider creator, and telling a story this clear, specific, and evocative with nothing more than Line Rider and jump cuts is a genuinely impressive feat of storytelling in medium not often utilized for such purposes. Ultimately, Three Memories of Snow is a singular work of remarkable storytelling that could only have been made in Line Rider itself.
🙌
Something Just Like This - Branches
Guest review by OTDE:
My first encounter with Something Just Like This was inflected with an unexpected cynicism. I recognized the piece’s backing track almost immediately - a Chainsmokers/Coldplay collaboration - and my perception of those artists as some mix of shallow or vapid meant I grumbled through the opening in the hopes that Branches would find a clever take on the song. To say they did so would undersell exactly what this track accomplished and how exceptionally they accomplished it.
The opening minute is sparse and mechanical in its coordination with the music, an antiseptic distillation of the pop song’s most obvious moments. The hook, the rising intensity as Chris Martin’s vocals swell, the punchy post-drop synth — all of these are dutifully recreated, with Bosh’s motion and expressiveness kept to a minimum. It’s the kind of no-frills execution you see when you encounter someone new to Line Rider attempting to emulate a DoodleChaos track without understanding what makes some of his tracks so effective. Branches are not new to this, though, so what gives?
The first sign this track has something else to offer comes when scenic elements appear in the periphery, sometimes depicting an idea in the second verse’s lyrics. As the song’s tone grows warmer and Martin waxes more poetic, Branches build the visual palate into an explosion of delightful detail. Far from the clinical marching orders prescribed by the opening, the track’s climax is a torrent of eye candy and sheer, unrestrained joy, hopping from concept to concept with pure glee.
Winding down from this, Branches leave the viewer with a striking statement: “those who don’t believe in magic will never find it themselves.” Far from just an exercise in Line Rider choreography, Something Just Like This is a manifesto, taking aim at snobbery, prejudice, and ironic distance. The distinction between the two styles of track serves a powerful purpose, pitting the intellectualizing, deconstructing, cold opening against the uncompromising, vulnerable, heartfelt climax. In effect, the track weaponizes my own cynicism against me, asking if I might give the Chainsmokers a chance to sweep me away, to let down my guard and get a bit weepy with Coldplay, to find joy and meaning in the cheesy and harmless where I would have previously dismissed it as shallow and vapid. I heartily encourage you, reader, to try Something Just Like This out for yourself. Branches have made some magic, and I believe in it.
I also experienced Something Just Like This as a call-out of sorts. Through my archival work and my work writing these roundups, I am often guilty of cynicism and distrust towards any art that takes on the appearance of something I have seen or heard done poorly many times before, a category that often includes everything from technique-based quirk to DoodleChaos-inspired flatsled music sync to cheesy pop music. The experience of watching Something Just Like This was the experience of having someone gently but firmly remind me that joy and even magic can come from something as basic as a simple Line Rider track synced to a generic pop song, if I’m willing to let down my guard and take it for what it is. My experience with this piece was intensely personal, but it’s a powerful message that I hope can resonate with everyone.
🙌
Headlock - UTD
Guest review by Hanuman:
A creative and masterfully produced piece utilising the layering system in linerider.com and post production. The music, editing and sync choices added a lot of oomph to this piece, and it was honestly fresh, engaging and intriguing, although I would say the falling section was slightly too long.
UTD continues to explore his unique music-video-esque blend of multi-rider choreography, heavy post-production, and ambiguous yet captivating narrative beats we last saw in Cradles with Headlock, a work that focuses on tension and conflict between green-scarf sledder and red-scarf sledder. This time around, the use of editing and invisible lines is much bolder, to the point where it would be more of a stretch to call Headlock a “track” than Cradles - Cradles at least sustained an illusion of being a single continuous track throughout, and while there is track in Headlock, it’s treated more as one ingredient in a music video than as the primary feature. It’s a bold choice, and Headlock is indeed brilliant at times - a flashback is conveyed effortlessly, music-synced color shifts work beautifully, a giant transparent red-scarf-rider head perfectly conveys that they are singing at the writhing offsled green-scarf rider, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much tension before from a sledder jumping off a cliff in a Line Rider video, a moment expertly conveyed with inverted colors and cinematic fixed-camera cuts. Other creative decisions, however are a bit confusing. The opening 70 seconds are done almost entirely with a fully invisible track, which could be an interesting idea, but this decision takes the focus off of the sledding and put it squarely onto the movement of the riders on the screen, which in this instance is unfortunately lacking much interest. And invisible lines zig-zagging red-scarf rider across the screen to the music as both riders fall endlessly makes for a tepid, uninspired ending. But damn, if that moment where the sledders jump off the cliff as the music kicks in and the video goes photonegative isn’t absolutely hype as hell!
👍
Afterschool America - DeafTab
A short but sweet lyric video with themes of alienation from one’s father, Afterschool America features half the lyrics in Times New Roman and the other half scribbled with the pencil tool along with sketches and drawings on the font, while Bosh rides through, on, and around casually mind-bending tunnels. All of this together gives off a vibe of a disaffected kid in school writing in the margins of a school assignment, trying to sort out their identity in relation to the rigid roles set out for them, signified by the “black pocket comb”. Afterschool America is obviously quite similar to vsbl’s 2020 release Freaks, but while Freaks feels like doodles in a disaffected middle schooler’s notebook, Afterschool America feels more like a high-schooler’s angry rant about their dad scribbled in the margins of an english assignment. It’s been a real treat to see DeafTab focusing the bulk of their work on writing out text and lyrics in Line Rider, a sub-genre that has been bursting with unexplored potential for years. Afterschool America can’t really hold a candle to DeafTab’s previous work, never coming close to reaching the emotional resonance of Everyone Asked About You, the comedy heights of We Don’t Wanna Die, or the typographical mastery of The Fall of Mr. Fifths, and there weren’t any moments in the piece that stood out to me or particularly surprised me, but it’s a solid and relatable piece, and I’m excited to see DeafTab continue to explore depictions of the written word in Line Rider.
👍
Daydreamer - pocke
Guest review by Hanuman:
A real phantasmagoria of animation and line-driven creative effects, this track was a definite trip and great to watch!
Daydreamer shares an aesthetic that is strikingly similar to the best moments of pocke’s April release Glacier Galaxy - with all the frenetic energy of A Fool Moon Night but more streamlined, refined, and visually dazzling. Its also the first pocke release since New Machines to actually feel complete, and that alone puts it head and shoulders above most of pocke’s work. However, Daydreamer lacks both the ingenuity and thematic elements of New Machines, so there’s not much of a takeaway from this newest release beyond “that was fun”. Daydreamer is an aesthetic rollercoaster, but it’s pretty flat by any other metric. One missed opportunity is the guitar solo in the second half of the track, a huge opportunity for development and the perfect place to put the most exciting stuff in the piece, a section unfortunately feels comparatively a bit phoned-in, as pocke reuses many of the same effects from the first half of the track. All that said, Daydreamer is undoubtedly a visual treat from start to finish, and the ending is a delightful little coda that feels like a breath of fresh air after all of the dazzling effects.
👍
You’re My Number One - Finalflash50
Guest review by Hanuman:
A simple yet well executed celebration of Line Rider. It was well choreographed and synced tastefully, long live Line Rider!
You’re My Number One is a three-rider track without much that’s new or unique going on, or even much of a central concept to speak of, and yet somehow it’s quite the enjoyable watch. The main thing that keeps it fun is the strength of the choreography - it’s all drop-dead simple from a technical perspective, but all three riders are constantly doing various flips, jumps, loops, nose manuals, and simple gravity well bits, often independently from each other, which keeps your screen full of action for the three-minute runtime. What really brings this home is the Smash-Bros-esque camera that follows the midpoint of the three riders, is constantly zooming in and out to keep all three just inside the frame. All of this makes You’re My Number One feel less like a short film and more like a live camera capturing the action of three sledders pulling off sick stunts in real time. Because of this unique feel, moments of very loose music-synced parallel choreo feel like they’re being improvised live by the sledders, and thus invite way more hype than they should have any right to create. It’s all an illusion, captured most likely through happy accident, but it’s a feeling I’ve never seen another Line Rider video capture before.
👍
piano line rider - Anton
Guest review by Hanuman:
A playful and meditative piece, subtly exploring different movements while keeping everything fairly refined. piano line rider is relaxing and satisfying to watch, just by watching you feel a little debonaire yourself. This track isn’t in a hurry and every watch made me feel a little more relaxed. Nice one Anton, this made me smile.
I got the same sense watching piano line rider that I did with Chuggers’ 2016 release Light Fantastic - of a Line Rider creator with a huge technical skillset making something that is, at least for them, chill and fun. It can be a tricky balance to walk for someone who is capable of extreme technicality to dial it back while still keeping the focus on precise choreography. TheMatsValk’s CircloO 2 from last month’s roundup is a clear example of a mismatch in tone, where the track, while less intense than most of TheMatsValk’s work, is too technical and jarring to match a relatively chill song. Fortunately, like Chuggers with Light Fantastic, Anton strikes a pitch-perfect balance here, deftly matching relatively simple quirk mechanics to jazz piano without the track ever feeling like it’s getting too big for its britches, or unnecessarily simplified. I would believe it if someone told me this was the 30th track Anton made to jazz piano in this style, because it feels refined, practiced, and confident, which, combined with the relatively relaxed approach to quirk techniques, makes piano line rider the closest thing to watching an anomaly76 video in 2021. Is it doing anything particularly exciting? Nah. But, like a cup of tea, it’s nice. Pleasant.
👍
E-Labyrinth - Mega Boy
Guest review by Hanuman:
This track had some great experimentation with high-speed and animation techniques. The 3D stuff was super trippy and impressive - maybe a first? It has a pretty standard start though.
The first half of E-Labyrith is utterly unremarkable, with extremely basic choreography loosely synced to a piece of EDM music (that inexplicably has a melody virtually identical to Unity by TheFatRat despite not appearing to be a remix) and some simple animation experimentation I’ve seen many times before. But in the second half, rather than attempting to slow the rider down anytime soon, Mega Boy lets the sledder fall through space endlessly and uses the new high speeds to do full-frame animation that, like iPi’s animation in his 2018 release Falling to the Beat, is simple but incredibly compelling. Watch Bosh ride a simple animated track, then watch gravity reverse as Bosh rides it upside down, and then, in the work’s real stroke of brilliance, a 3D track animated to show Bosh traveling down a path à la Beat Saber, before similar gravity reversals flip that 3D world upside down, and even spin Bosh in a rotating path that reminds me of that one room in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s forest temple. What really sells this animation demo is that, like in Falling to the Beat, Bosh is being affected by track lines to respond to the animations throughout, completing the illusion. On the whole, despite its creator claiming that it is “probably one of the top 10 best tracks” (yeah ok buddy) the work is a mess of experimentation without any central theme, unifying structure, or compelling narrative, and most of it is unremarkable. But it’s absolutely worth watching for the unique and well-executed animations in the second half.
👍
Another Medium - ethanahtethan
Guest review by Hanuman:
Quirky and bizarre, this track had a great vibe that it carried almost all the way through and I absolutely loved the choice of style with the music. Quirk in a cave? Never considered it but it worked in a weirdly good way, somehow enhancing the feeling of danger foreboded by the danger/stop signs. I did hope for slightly more scenery after the cave as the track felt like it degenerated into more of a formulaic offering, but the non-scened track was still good to watch for the most part.
Guest review by OTDE:
It’s a fool’s errand to try and reinvent the decade-spanning, tried-and-true “rocks-and-rails” subgenre of Line Rider tracks, but Ethan tries here with Another Medium, set to the Undertale song of the same name. I don’t think they succeed, but I think the reasons why they don’t are interesting and useful points of discussion.
The track begins with a flurry of warnings, all blithely ignored, as Bosh enters a cave system. What makes this track unique is that it’s fundamentally a quirk track that doesn’t try to hide it: the gritty aesthetic nightmare of gravity wells in all their permutations are left on full display, even explicitly centered in many cases. It’s an artistic choice that explicitly acknowledges the difficulty of blending scenery grounded in existing concepts with track elements that resemble none of those concepts in form or in Bosh’s interaction with them. Line Rider artists have resolved this issue in a number of ways, to varying degrees of success. Another Medium doesn’t bother. The result is messy and disjointed, but it exposes that tension so clearly that it almost comes across as charming. Yes, I will put this hand fling next to some rock. No, I will not explain it.
Ultimately, it’s a track that’s more of an exercise in giving up than anything; in trying to be both an intense quirk and a dizzying, claustrophobic cave journey, Another Medium fails to be either by any metric. Any claustrophobia falls away when the unfinished caves melt away, and any intensity in the quirk feels out of place amid languid, slurring synth bass. The result is a track that will feel inconsistent to quirk aficionados and mystifying to an audience unfamiliar with quirk.
This all sounds pretty harsh, but I think it should be said that this kind of thing will happen when an artist tries to express an idea without thinking especially hard about the tools that would empower them to convey their ideas most fluently. I’ve been there! I have made this track a couple of times, actually. It sucks, because it can feel like your skills have pigeonholed you into a particular kind of track, even as you try to work outside your comfort zone. I think with some more deliberation over how Bosh might move through the cave, how to give the warnings more impact, and so on, this could have been a really cool concept. Ethan, as grumpy as I probably sound here, I hope you keep experimenting, that you spend more time getting comfortable with everything Line Rider has to offer (that includes, but is not limited to, quirk), and that you find ways to bring your ideas more completely into the world in ways that you can feel satisfied with.
Another Medium has a strong start with Bosh zooming past various “Do Not Enter” signs over foreboding music, before then speeding through a cave with the aid of quirk, reminiscent of Tovio’s 2019 work Nightmare. Unfortunately, unlike Nightmare, Another Medium lacks any narrative development after this setup, and after a slow degradation of the strength of its visuals, the scenery almost completely disappears in the second half and we are left with the same frenetic quirk sans scenery. The result is Another Medium feels largely unfinished. Tragically, judging by the video’s YouTube description it seems the reason for abandonment of the scenery is that Ethan was filling in the back background of the caves by hand, seemingly unaware of the linerider.com shade mod. Even setting this aside though, it’s unclear that there was any narrative concept beyond the poorly drawn sign at the start of the piece reading “CAUTION! Dangerous caverns ahead!”, which is a real shame. It was a strong hook and I would have liked to see it developed more. My guess is that the quirk-heavy track was made first and the attempts at scenery and narrative added after, and sadly that’s often a recipe for these kinds of unsatisfying half-finished Line Rider endeavors.
🤷
Duel of the Fates - Omer Rabin
Guest review by Hanuman:
Huge waste of potential for me. The Boshes even colour-correspond with the lightsabers from the original scene in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. I was expecting a huge fight scene with the potential for dismounts and remounts, what I got was little more than random gibberish with a cool song. Thumbs down from me.
Omer Rabin has been one of numerous Line Rider YouTube channels attempting to copy the DoodleChaos formula since April 2020, with results that have ranged from the extremely dull and uninspired to halfway decent off-brand Matthew Buckley, and I figured now is as good a time as ever to write about them. Rabin is a big fan of multiple riders and dashed lines at high speeds to superficially sync to music, with a couple of line drawings loosely related to the music that fly by in an instant in the video but do make for a nice YouTube thumbnail. More recently, Rabin has been getting into remounting with their most recent prior work from April 2021, Thunder Storm (set to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony in an even more direct copy of DoodleChaos than usual), featuring some remounts synced to motifs. Over the last 15 months Rabin has slowly been getting pretty good at handling multiple riders, flatsled music sync, and now remounting mechanics, so Duel of the Fates held a lot of potential for a work that could elevate Omer Rabin’s channel to something more than a DoodleChaos copycat. Unfortunately, this potential is mostly squandered. There’s a solid awareness of the overall structure of the music, with Boshes dramatically entering and exiting at well-planned moments, but Rabin seemingly has no idea what to do with them once they are on-screen, limiting the choreography to the same old superficial music sync. Worse, the remounting is done haphazardly at seemingly random points that are similarly superficially synced. I would love to see Omer Rabin branch out and experiment with choreography, structure, music choice, narrative, decoration, or really anything at all, but it seems they may just be recreating DoodleChaos on a surface level until they eventually stop creating Line Rider videos altogether, which is a real shame.
👎
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