November 2024 Line Rider Roundup
Look! A monthly roundup that is released within the following month! It’s non-denominational winter-solstice-adjacent co-opted-holiday-from-ancient-pagan-traditions miracle! Thanks to UTD, Jade, September, and Alt-Key Here for the guest reviews! Enjoy :)
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
Puzzlespace - September Hofmann
Review by UTD:
I have a weird relationship with video games. As someone who grew up in a suburban hellscape with walkable spaces that got harder and harder to come by as time went on, video games often served as a way of satiating my childlike wonder and desire to explore the world. Most of the games I played as a kid were MMOs with massive maps and rich lore-building. Fusionfall, Toontown, Wizard101 — all of these games had main missions and battles and level progression, but I never cared about any of that. I'd spend most of my time on these games marveling at the virtual towns and indulging in all the minigames and side features. When video games weren't an outlet for exploration, they were otherwise an outlet for creativity. Most of my time playing Webkinz was spent on the barebones “Create Movie” feature. Most of my time playing Club Penguin was spent on trying to make elaborate, story-based YouTube videos with Unregistered Hypercam 2. And games like Toontown and Wizard101 had these intricate ways to decorate your house that I'd mess with for hours on end. Perhaps my favorite MMO was Free Realms, because alongside having the most robust house-building mechanisms and a built-in video recorder that I'd use to make shitty videos with, the entire point of that game... at first... was simply to explore. There was no priority towards a larger storyline or levelling up your character. There was nothing limiting you from discovering every nook and cranny the game had to offer. There were even ways to go out of bounds into unreleased areas containing nothing but brown terrain, inescapable pits, and the occasional weird monument you'd usually only see in the distance. ...I miss these games.
Line Rider is one of the few games from my childhood that still persists to this day, and it's probably the only surviving game from my childhood that hasn't been tainted in some way. With that said, to call Line Rider a game would be to ignore my actual application of it. In practice, it's much more appropriately categorized as an art program. But I guess that's what I like about it as a game. What's traditionally regarded as games have rigidly defined rules and win conditions, but I've never been interested in that aspect of video games. In that regard, maybe I just don't like games in general. Or maybe I just have a much different outlook on what video games can be. Line Rider has helped me work through my complicated feelings towards animation. Perhaps it can do the same for games? Tracks like Flappy Bosh and Line Rider Crossword Puzzle have shown the potential of making a game within Line Rider itself, repurposed as its own esoteric game engine. Sure, using Line Rider in that way is more unintuitive than viewing it as an alternative art medium of sorts, but there is precedence for it.
And yet I would've never expected anything quite like Puzzlespace, best described as a gigantic, multi-media video game / art project / Line Rider ARG that is simultaneously breathtaking in scope and extremely limited in its reach. It's likely that only a handful of people will ever fully appreciate this track. Fortunately, I am one of those people, and there is a lot to talk about. However, given the scale and nature of this track, I will have to separate my review into two parts: The Main Game and The Post Game. I've also decided that my review will contain spoilers, mostly because I can't imagine most people who don't have the luxury of being in a voice call with September being able to see this track all the way through. I still recommend at least taking a crack at Puzzlespace before continuing on with this review, though... especially if you're someone who's a Line Rider aficionado. Come back when you either reach the end or give up.
The Main Game:
My initial impression of Puzzlespace was actually kind of lukewarm. It starts with these massive walls of text explaining how the game works and what settings you need to turn on before starting. Given that this is a game in Line Rider, some of this was obviously unavoidable. Regardless, I feel like a lot of the information this track immediately dumps on you could've been conveyed across much more succintly and effectively. You're then greeted with these 2 rebus puzzles to get you started... except these example puzzles are actually pretty hard. I spent around 30 minutes trying to figure them out, dreading that the rest of the puzzles were gonna be way too hard for me. I ended up only getting the first puzzle right without any hints. I wasn't so lucky with the second puzzle, which costed me a hint. In terms of other people, some only got the second puzzle right without any hints. Either way, you're likely to suffer right out of the gate. And since those example puzzles count towards the overall score, you have to do them... or something. But then you get to the actual start and the difficulty balancing is much more reasonable. The first 2 puzzles in easy difficulty are very well known tracks with very easy to decipher puzzles, and I don't understand why those couldn't have been the example puzzles instead of ones that felt like they were medium-hard difficulty.
Now, even though the difficulty balancing is more reasonable in the actual game, that still doesn't mean there aren't any hiccups. Puzzle 17 was a noticeable spike in difficulty compared to the rest of the medium puzzles. The answer is a basically defunct artifact of Line Rider history and the hints aren't the most helpful. Similarly, puzzle 47 was extremely cryptic and everyone, including me, never got it on their first try despite the track not being obscure. On the flipside, puzzle 51 is... very easy for insane difficulty. I thought this puzzle was initially here because the track didn't go viral or anything. But the answer for puzzle 8 actually has less views than the track for puzzle 51, yet that puzzle is in easy difficulty? How a track's popularity factored into its puzzle's difficulty was generally all over the place. The same could be said for some of the hints, which were sometimes more confusing than the original puzzle. I will say all of the hints did have a good progression of getting easier the more you revealed, even if the hints sometimes got too easy. Like, the final hint of puzzle 61 literally just tells you the trackmaker's name, which essentially gives you a free bonus point. But hints that clued you into the artist of the song for a given track were almost always never helpful.
As far as other criticisms go, zooming out leads to a massive problem. Because the hints and answers were covered with -0.2 shading instead of -0.5 shading, answers and hints are visible from a far enough distance. This means it's very easy to accidentally spoil yourself as a result of wanting to see an entire puzzle. But the biggest criticism I have is the file containing 700-800,000 lines, meaning there was a ton of lag, meaning it was hard to write on the track itself without getting rid of stuff like text or miscellaneous cosmetics. You're better off opening up a separate notepad window to document all of your answers. But ultimately, I did like the core experience of figuring out a puzzle. It was very satisfying whenever I got an answer without any hints, especially as the puzzles kept getting harder. Puzzle 73 was the most satisfying for me personally, as I actually got it without revealing any hints after an hour of being stumped on it. And from what I saw of other people playing through the main game, they had a good time too. Had Puzzlespace stopped here, I'd consider it a fun albeit flawed experiment.
The Post Game:
This is where the real game starts. Past the boundaries of the main game, you'll find a new island where you can rack up “bonus points” to add to your overall score. Not like those points will matter, though. What the game doesn't tell you when you get this far is that points are functionally worthless from here on out. The longer you traverse through the post game, the more apparent this becomes. I'm of two minds on this choice. On one hand, I would like to see a version of Puzzlespace where the points actually served a purpose and were given more weight dependent on the difficulty via scaling. On the other hand, the only extent to which I cared about the points were for flexing purposes, and what I got out of the game when their relevance diminished was way more intriguing to me.
In the post game, the main objective is no longer to get the right answer with the least amount of hints; it's to explore. Clues from previous puzzles now serve as a kind of legend for navigating your way around uncharted territory. Research and outside help goes from being something you should avoid into powerful tools for uncovering more and more secrets. Your role as a player shifts to be more like that of an archaeologist looking for prehistoric fossils, with less focus paid attention to your general Line Rider knowledge. And every time you think you've reached a natural stopping point, there ends up being more to explore. More secrets, more hidden codes, more track files!?!? After a certain point, puzzles no longer feel like gameplay but rather like quirky landmarks to dig your teeth into. It took me right back to those days of playing my favorite MMOs. My inner child's desire to explore the world never died out, and having a track/game remind me of that euphoria for the first time in forever was something truly special.
If all of that wasn't enough, you're even given an opportunity to make your own rebus puzzle at the end and September herself will play through it! Had I the time to do so, I would've gone totally HAM on this section. Alas, my time is currently limited and so I had to settle with something much more barebones to send. But that isn't to say the experience ended with a dud. The game just kept getting more fun as I continued, and the reward I got upon completion (yes, there is a reward) was well worth the days of grinding and mild confusion. The only caveat is that I played most of the post game in a voice call with September who gave me minor tips whenever I got stuck. Plus, while I was playing through the track, there were errors that September had to fix on a “Day 5 Patch”. So when it comes to how accessible this track is to people who aren't friends with the trackmaker or aren't extremely familiar with Line Rider history, there are certainly criticisms to be made. But I almost don't care at the same time. And despite the first half of this review being mostly spent on my problems with Puzzlespace, I also don't care about those criticisms either. Yes, your mileage on the second half of the game may vary from mine or other people, and if puzzle games aren't your thing, you probably aren't gonna like Puzzlespace very much. But video games are art, and as it turns out, the thing I value the most out of video games is the same thing I value the most out of all art; the friends you play with and the sense of community you recieve and reciprocate.
The Line Rider community is relatively small compared to other online spaces. It's history and culture is extremely niche, and there's not much of a career to be made out of making Line Rider tracks, unless you're literally DoodleChaos. The game is widely seen as a relic of the past and most of the Line Rider tracks featured in Puzzlespace hardly crack 1000 views. There is no monetary or social gain September will get from making Puzzlespace. But I'm very grateful it exists, I'm glad to have played it, and I'm glad to have friends like September in my life. This track, game, art piece... whatever you wanna call it... is a celebration of the connections we have made as a result of our shared interest in this silly little toy from 2006, and much like Line Rider itself, Puzzlespace will always hold a special place in my heart. I want to see more tracks like this; hell, I might even try making a track like this myself in the future. It's really unlike anything I've seen before, while also being emblematic of what the Line Rider community is about and what makes it so incredible. It's why I don't think there will ever be a time where Line Rider dies out completely. There will always be something new to explore, new friends to be made, and new memories to be had. And at the end of the day, that's what makes Line Rider a great game.
The goal of this project was, ultimately, to spend time with people I care about as they solved some puzzles that I made for them. I wanted to create a space of shared enjoyment. And in that regard, I had so much fun watching you solve my puzzles and uncover all the wild twists and turns I created for this project. We don't get a lot of time in this life, so spending it with people who make us happy and setting aside time to enjoy ourselves is so important. Because of people like you, I won't ever regret the 3 months of my life I put into this project.
BREAKFAST - poraneva
Review by Bevibel:
When I was a kid, I averaged one or two hyperfixations per year. They came and went like waves. One year it was rock collecting, one year it was astronomy, one year it was making music in Garageband, one year it was making games in Game Maker, and then one year it was Line Rider. That last one never went away. As I draw near to 18 years of Line Rider being the only lasting special interest of my life, I am once again asking myself, “Why?” It’s hard to pinpoint, of course, but my favorite moments in Line Rider videos tend to viscerally capture a bit of music, creating an audio-visual experience that is far more impactful than either would have on its own. Approximately three seconds into my first watch of BREAKFAST, I experienced a particularly striking moment like this in such intense concentration that it felt like I had a momentary out-of-body experience. Something about the body parts of the sledder physically separating, expanding into space with a dramatic choral chord and then snapping back together… it was so unexpected and yet so perfect. I screamed.
poraneva is a new creator who seemingly came out of nowhere to drop three tracks this month in a stunning triple-debut, my favorite of which was BREAKFAST, which might actually be my favorite track of the entire month. Exploring visual motifs touched on in Anton’s 2021 release surrender in a fresh new way, poraneva uses post-production to pull apart and then reassemble the sledder graphic in silhouette. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the track besides this particularly inspired idea, but I’ll be damned if it’s not a powerful idea. It’s especially put to good use in the latter half of the track. During a long upwards fall, the sledder’s body parts slowly drift to the edges of the screen and then back again, while handwritten animated lyrics about vulnerability fill the screen, before we gently arrive back on a line to close out the piece. I loved the visual at the end of surrender and how it conveyed the experience of ego death, but I’ll confess what I really wanted was the parts of Bosh to drift impossibly far apart, and then pull back together to reassemble into a sledder once more. Ego death is a beautiful and powerful experience, but at some point you have to stop dissociating, return to your body, and put one foot in front of the other again. BREAKFAST captured, for me, the ecstasy of a transcendent revelation, alongside the humbling mundanity of continuing on with your life afterwards.
How the World Works - autumnroo538
Review by Bevibel:
How the World Works is the rare Line Rider work that’s so polished and straightforward that it feels like it could be an official music video for the song. After all, Bo Burnham’s song is a scathing leftist critique of the entirety of the modern American paradigm disguised as a Sesame-Street-style children’s song, so the childlike aesthetic of Line Rider hiding a deeper artistic depth than expected is a perfect fit. Autumn’s movement stays rudimentary throughout How the World Works, but it’s not without subtle touches and moments of virtuosic flair. The drawings are simple and rudimentary, which is perfect for the aesthetic of a children’s book that suddenly gets uncomfortably direct and meta about the dystopian nightmare we actually live in. The text of How the World Works is written out in full by hand, which spotlights the messaging to ensure it doesn’t get lost in the aesthetics. The only thing that is really lost in translation is the visual of the sock puppet, which is a problem I don’t know that I would have any ideas about how to solve. How the World Works didn’t blow me away by any means, but it’s absolutely worth checking out. If you’re familiar with the original song, it’s exactly what you might expect. And if you’re not? Well, let’s just say you’re in for a treat!
Frank Ocean - vsbl
Review by September:
On my own, deeply personal level, vsbl is a bit of a Line Rider legend. Despite a relatively short run of tracks, they managed to produce a handful of tracks that managed to completely transform the Line Rider scene in the years going forward. Tracks like Freaks, Cold Death and Waves From Nothing ended up being deeply influential on the tracks that followed—especially when it comes to me, September. If not for the technical simplicity and narrative beauty of vsbl’s work, I would have never had the motivation nor the confidence to pick up that Line Rider pen and release the original Lipstick Stains, my first-ever track release. vsbl often still lurks in my tracks’ inspiration lists, the germination point from which my creative voice in this medium grew and still grows. So I’ll admit I have a bit of a bias when it comes to this particular track-maker!
But after this initial string of tracks, vsbl’s output slowed way down, and they grew more scarce in the LR community in general. Frank Ocean comes after a two-year hiatus from vsbl—which followed a one-year hiatus before the release of True Love. And unfortunately, neither of these tracks manage to quite capture the raw emotions and narrative beauty of their previous releases. However, while in retrospect True Love feels like a bit of a nothingburger of a track, Frank Ocean captures some of that classic vsbl storytelling and complexity. Set to Frank Ocean’s “Wiseman”—an isolated single which was originally left on the cutting room floor of Quentin Tarintino’s “Django Unchained” and only released later—Frank Ocean does a number of surprising things to complicate and deepen the track’s relationship to the music, re-interpreting and destabilizing the meaning of the original song.
Perhaps the most immediately apparent oddity is the track’s title—Frank Ocean. These days, the convention for titling Line Rider tracks is generally to name it the title of the song it syncs to—and, barring that, titling it some new, original thing entirely separate from your music choice. Here, vsbl has chosen to name Frank Ocean after the music’s recording artist instead of the name of the specific musical composition it syncs to. This is, like, really weird! Even on just a practical level, imagine if everyone who set a Line Rider track to, say, a Sufjan Stevens or Porter Robinson song named their track “Sufjan Stevens” or “Porter Robinson”—it would make distinguishing between those tracks nigh-on impossible. Is the implication here that Frank Ocean is the song’s titular “wise man”—or is vsbl trying to say something specific about Frank Ocean the person with the entirety of this track? It’s unclear, but it immediately destabilizes our relationship with the music, the musical artist, and the track, conflating them in ways which feel surprising and disorienting.
Then, there are the lyrics. vsbl includes subtitles which have been video-edited into the top of the screen throughout the track in a way evocative of the Chase the Mountains, a previous video-editing experiment of theirs. That’s nothing too unique, but what’s interesting is the way Frank Ocean plays with the linebreaks of the lyrics in order to throw their meanings into disarray. To illustrate this point, this how Genius renders some of the lyrics from “Wiseman”:
Bad man don' exist, no
No evil man exists
Good man don't exist, no
No righteous man exists
This is how vsbl renders the same lyrical sequence:
bad man don’t exist
no, no
evil man exists
good man don’t exist
no, no
righteous man exist
What a world of difference a few line breaks can make, huh? In vsbl’s rendering, the lyrics end up conveying almost the complete opposite of Genius’s lineation. The Genius version is more linear, standard—essentially restating a sequence of points regarding the nonexistence of good and evil. But vsbl’s version of the lyrics interpret the “no, no” not as the components of two separate spoken phrases, but as a single interjection existing as its own musical unit. In doing so, the “no” from “no evil man exists” is removed from that phrasal unit, transforming its meaning into its exact opposite—“evil man exists”. The Frank Ocean of these lyrics is more enigmatic, self contradicting, nonlinear. Even though this Frank Ocean asserts that “good” and “bad” men don’t exist, he is careful to clarify and affirm the exist of “evil” and “righteous” men as a category separate from “good” and “bad.” It reads like some kind of koan or riddle, the kind of head scratcher a so-called “wise man” might throw at you. The effect, then, is a sense of confusion and destabilization as we read the lyrics, unable to reach a singular, unified meaning.
And then, of course, there’s the ending. Although all versions of the song end up abruptly cutting out, vsbl places the cut off point for “Frank Ocean” extremely early, right as it feels like the song is about to open up into a new musical space. The track itself also supports this feeling—as we enter into the transition to this new progression or stage of the music, Bosh falls off a cliff as multicolored birds grow in size and swirl around them, enhancing this sensation of “build up” through a correlated increase in intensity of the visuals and the rider’s speed. We are building up, building up, about to enter this musical space, waiting for Bosh to land—and then the track cuts short. No fade to black, just a hard cut to end-of-video, 3x4 array of youtube video recommendations and all. With one simple action, the rug is pulled out from under the viewer, and we leave the track just as disoriented as we entered—the possibility of musical and track-structural resolution is suspended, leaving the track open, disappointingly hanging in the air, waiting for a climax that will never come.
None of these choices quite cohere… and yet, they kind of do? This is what I love about vsbl’s own particular, unreplicatable trackmaking style—this capacity to make strange choices which add psychological and emotional depth to works which seem initially or otherwise unassuming. I do wish there was a bit more here to make it feel like these choices were intentional and directed, instead of the product of a series of unintentional accidents that makes me question if I am just bullshitting myself into over-analyzing a work with more thought than was put into it. But, ultimately, I end up finding all of these elements enjoyable and strange and resonant, and definitely one which belongs in the unique canon of vsbl’s voice.
Shame, though, that the moment-to-moment experience of watching the track feels rather weak—namely, Frank Ocean features a lot of only-vaguely-synced flatsled over a series of bouncy lines while the track moves exclusively to the right. It’s a punctuated with a few drawings now and then—with written-out lyrics, or an occasional line of color or drawings of birds—and those moments are great and are definitely appreciated. But those interesting moment-to-moment experiences feel too few and far between—and vsbl’s interesting edits to the lyrics alone hanging above the track can’t help the fact that the track feels just a little too sparse and too linear—especially when we compare Frank Ocean to other vsbl works like Freaks and Waves From Nothing. It’s closer to a Cold Death vibe, but Cold Death is able to enrich it’s sparseness with the tension generated by its narrative elements (namely, suicide)—something that Frank Ocean isn’t quite able to do with it’s elements, which end up more of an enigmatic stew. But enigmas + sparseness isn’t really exciting combo—in fact, it leans more towards the boring, which on that experiential-technical level I would say is the single thing which most hampers the vibe for Frank Ocean—to the point of being a near-fatal weakness.
Regardless, there’s still a lot here that’s compelling and thoughtful material—and on some level, I’m just glad vsbl is still around now and then, making Line Rider tracks. My hope is that vsbl sticks around just a bit more and takes the fascinating experimental elements in this track and expands upon them in even more compelling ways—and maybe invests some additional time into their movement and visuals to better able to support their amazing capacity for creating rich narrative and psychological experiences within this medium.
blossom - poraneva
Review by Jade:
I don’t know about you, but I feel like Line Rider’s woken up a bit lately after a somewhat sleepy year. Maybe it’s just that it’s the holidays and people are rushing to finish projects for the end of the year (like we do every year), but something’s shifted in the air, like we suddenly remembered how uncomplicatedly awesome this medium is, and for whatever reason I’m going to heavily associate this shift with the first few tracks released by poraneva. I got really excited when I saw blossom, a dream., and their newest release BREAKFAST, since it’s been about a year since a brand new Line Rider artist emerged onto the scene showing this much promise. An artist like this doesn’t tend to just show up, and yeah, apparently poraneva has actually been making tracks and following Line Rider in the background for a couple of years, but just hasn’t released anything. Now that’s changed and I’m so grateful to them for sharing this, since it’s gotten me really excited about this medium’s future direction.
All three of their tracks so far are exciting in their own ways, but their debut blossom is my personal favourite. I know it’s a calm track that doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, but that didn’t stop me from inappropriately hooting and hollering at my screen in reaction to various subtle yet powerful choices. Just imagine me seeing an awkward little stumble and me responding “Oh shit!!!” — that was pretty much my experience watching this for the first time. The camerawork is especially effective, with these small zoom-ins and zoom-outs that allow the track to breathe alongside the tiny cycles of rises and falls in the music, flowing in between feelings of intimacy and distance. The music doesn’t really escalate or build instrumentally, but the song is definitely not stagnant, and poraneva moves Bosh in simple, precious ways that capture the little melodic adventures that each verse takes us on. That “i love you” moment too is kind of indescribable, where the high-pitched voice cuts away only for that one lyric, and poraneva mirrors this distinction by having it be the only written lyric of the whole track, but it’s written twice— like, huh?? I was already pretty familiar with “Blossom” by Porter Robinson, so I was curious how they would choose to capture this moment, and when it happened, it felt perfect and I agreed, and yet it was very surprising, with the two greys separated like two people in one body briefly recognizing each other, as Bosh briefly floats between the two texts.
The simultaneous surprise and satisfaction of that moment is sort of how this whole track feels to me — the movement strikes a balance between feeling fresh and familiar in the context of the past few years of Line Rider movement. poraneva experiments with stillness in ways that almost remind me of how it felt to watch Bevibel’s Broken for the first time, while also bearing strong resemblance in its meditative playfulness with space recycling to recent bangers like pocke’s how it feels to chew 5 gum. poraneva in their debut track has already developed a unique sensibility and touch to moving Bosh that spans generations of Line Rider choreographers, and they are definitely the newest Line Rider artist to keep an eye out for heading into the new year… that is, if they keep sharing things, which I really hope they do. I’m a huge fan already!
Haunt You Still - pocke
Review by Jade:
Even though I love this track to bits, I’m gonna try to keep this short, since half of my feelings about this track are “wow this is so beautiful”, like in a very simple way where I just think everything is really nice to look at; however, there is an undeniable depth to this niceness. This track came out shortly after the September 2024 roundup in which I reviewed pocke’s previous release sighs, praising its use of intentional incompleteness in depicting environments, and it seems like pocke may have taken note and leaned into these visual gaps even further, most notably with the inclusion of fragmented body parts and half-drawn faces that bleed into the scenery.
I’ll point you to a few things to notice while you watch Haunt You Still. Take note of the times when pocke changes the strength of gravity – they’re small but powerful moments, and let yourself feel the difference in weight between the slow and fast moments, especially as the rider swoops into the curvature of a chipped wine glass. See if you can spot all the track’s human faces (you won’t catch them all on your first watch) and think about what pocke might be trying to communicate with them – how they might reflect our incomplete perceptions of other people, the gaps in how we view one another. Pay attention to the ways that body parts intertwine with the landscapes, like the eye that cries oceanic currents, or the tree that grows roots that form the shape of a muscular torso, and if you’re comfortable thinking about your body, remind yourself that your arms and eyes and bones are all part of nature and her beauty. Lastly, try to catch the moon that shows up initially as a full moon, but reappears later in a crescent shape, and notice how that conveys a passage of time and the aging of the track’s emotional state. These are just some things that come to mind for me when I watch, and it might help guide you through this one emotionally and give the track more staying power. Or, you can just generally admire how pretty Haunt You Still is from afar, and it’ll still be excellent.
Halloween in Bosh’s Mansion 2 - XaviLR
Review by Alt-Key Here:
As a first-time writer for this monthly roundup, I don’t know if I’m missing anything, so I’ll dress up as Batman and just “wing it”. (sorry). In the spirit of that one holiday where people dress up to receive candy, XaviLR was not one to miss out! Four years after their original Halloween in Bosh's Mansion, XaviLR finds themselves in the Halloween spirit, with Halloween in Bosh's Mansion 2. XaviLR is well known for using post-production and Blender in incredible ways, and this track is no different.
The track starts similarly to the original, except for the now three-dimensional hallway, made by exporting a flat group of lines as a .svg file, importing it into Blender, and using some XaviLR magic to create an actual parallax effect from what is essentially a flat image. Now I am no expert in this process, but it works wonders in Bosh’s Mansion 2, where they make beams, hallways, and doors have actual depth. Bosh briefly enters a bedroom, before heading outside speeding up with the music’s intensity. Next, we re-enter the hallways, except they aren’t as they seem… XaviLR then created a sequence of doors opening, transporting Bosh through several scenes before finally ending in what I can only describe as a Dr. Seuss factory, with a whole load of action before the end of the track.
I have grown fond of XaviLR’s comedic style in tracks like Rush E 3, and outside, both of which have been featured in earlier roundups. While I do enjoy XaviLR’s exploration into adding depth to tracks, there are times when it takes away from the track. At the beginning of the track, the optical illusion used to create a hallway breaks after some time, and the support beams are not stationary in perspective to the ground. In the bedroom, the floor doesn’t extend past the camera making the zoom-out slightly confusing. I’ll stop pixel-peeping. In all, Halloween in Bosh’s Mansion 2 is an awesome track, and I look forward to seeing what XaviLR does with these new tools.
PEACE - moss7
Review by Bevibel:
My assessment of moss7 boils down to “not a content farm, just a person who is having a great time doing quirk and uploads the result”. He has continued this month to churn out tracks at an astonishing pace, releasing no less than five over the course of November. Most of them I feel no pressing need to comment on, though if you really like quirky noodling with some aesthetic touches you are absolutely encouraged to go forth and enjoy.
PEACE, however, is something different. Sure, the noodling is still present, and the charming-yet-usually-aimless doodles, but in my opinion they are employed towards a much more compelling purpose because of other major ways PEACE departs from prior moss7 releases. For starters, It’s much more linear than the average moss7 track, consistently driving from left-to-right fairly aggressively for most of the runtime. I’m not necessarily for or against linearity, but moss7’s tracks tend towards the opposite end of the spectrum to a degree I often find frustrating. If you ask me, the increased linearity here matches the forward momentum of the music pretty well, and moss7 does a good job of relaxing this and getting more noodly whenever the music gets a little more introspective and directionless. PEACE also has a flair for music-visualization, in a style that reminds me of a more frantic rendition of Adam Woods’s Hunted by Freak, if Adam was way more into quirk, way less content with minimalism, and liked to occasionally scrawl lyrics across the screen a la My Boy. But the standout element of PEACE comes when Bosh is ejected from the sled, and the camera, rather than following the sledder (the assumed convention), remains fixed on the sled. Throughout the track, the sledder comes and goes, dismounting and remounting at key moments in the music while the sled remains on the central path. It works incredibly well, expanding on the idea moss7 first entertained in Interlude into something really fun and playful.
Fascinatingly, per the video description, it appears that the more linear first half was made last summer, and the more noodly second half was made in November. The obvious shift in styles felt to me like a natural progression that matched the song musically and thematically, starting out strong and assured before gently crumbling into pleading and self-doubt later on, so it’s weird to discover that it was apparently unplanned! It also means that what to me was the highlight of the track - the tightly choreographed dismounting and remounting - was also all made back in August! This leaves me without a lot of hope that we’ll see anything like this again from moss7, which I find to be more a than a little saddening. But hey, even if it was a fluke, even if everything I liked about it was more or less an accident, I still really enjoyed PEACE and I’m glad it came into existence in exactly the way it did.
let it fall (some of the things I've been thinking about these days) - Autumn
Review by Bevibel:
Sometimes you can tell that a work was created as a sort of unfiltered dumping ground for raw thoughts and emotions, without any coherent purpose or message. However, lack of a coherent message does not equate to lack of meaning or value. The human mind can be a very a messy and chaotic place, and sometimes it can be meaningful just to bear witness to the chaos of another person’s thoughts, especially if you see some of your own messy, chaotic thoughts reflected back at you. let it fall may not have much of a “point”, per se, but after a year that I find extraordinarily difficult to describe beyond saying, “It was a lot,” I found it to be comforting. Maybe you will too.
So Soon! - Goose exe
Review by Bevibel:
Goose has come a long way since I Can’t Handle Change in 2022. So Soon! may be a relatively straightforward movement-only manuquirk sync, but in my opinion it marks a solidification of Goose’s movement style that we saw the first hints of a year ago with disquietude. Goose is known for releases alternating between shitposts like wat did yuo sae that really ride the line between “worst thing you’ve ever seen” and “genuinely brilliant”, and lush and poignant work like i think i'm going to be okay, so it’s something of a surprise to experience something like So Soon! from the same source. There are no silly jokes, scened environments, or meaningful sentiments here, only raw movement chops synced to math rock. Not only that, but there’s way more variety and precision in the movement of So Soon! than any prior Goose release, and all this makes it feel almost like it come out of nowhere. And yet, So Soon! is so good at manipulation of Bosh’s movement that I genuinely thought certain sections were sped up until I was directly informed that they were not (turns out there are just a bunch of sneaky invisible lines). It’s not anything particularly memorable, but for my money, it’s some of the best music-synced manuquirk around. I hope to see more of this new side of Goose, especially if they manage to integrate it into some of those lush environments and poignant sentiments.
Mrs Magic - MoonXplorer
Review by Bevibel:
The description of MoonXplorer’s other release this month, I Remember You, contains this apologetic note:
sorry my stuff has been very half assed lately, i just dont rlly have enough motivation lately :c expect better stuff later on!!!
As a reviewer, I often find myself feeling annoyed at Line Rider artists for feeling like their work is inadequate, especially when it hinders their ability to continue making art. However, if I’m being honest, “half-assed” feels like an apt description of both I Remember You and Mrs Magic. After a string of highly promising releases including With my Hands Out, Dear Pet Rock, I Love You, Love Yourself, and We Never Change - which I raved about last month - tracks like Mrs Magic and I Remember You feel like a significant downgrade. I Remember You appears to continue the narrativization of MoonXplorer’s relationship with their partner in I Love You and Love Yourself, which seems to have gone the route of some form of breakup. Since it feels rude to criticize such a work about such personal subject, I don’t want to focus on it too much, so I will simply say that for me (someone currently dealing with my own feelings of heartbreak), there’s not much going on in I Remember You that I connected with, on a thematic, technical, or aesthetic level. Maybe that’s not the experience of everyone who watched this track, but it’s the case for me, and so it leaves without much to say.
Mrs Magic, meanwhile, I do want to talk about in more depth, because it feels very directly like a lesser version of We Never Change. It’s so strikingly similar in its structure, themes, and aesthetics that it leaves me befuddled as to why it was made. It’s like, We Never Change is right there! To tackle the lighter stuff first and talk about aesthetics, MoonXplorer has jumped headfirst into utilizing the line thickness feature - a tool that can be utilized to great effect (such as in my favorite track of the year, UTD’s it's time to give up on being human), but in this instance ends up creating something of a baby’s-first-Microsoft-Paint aesthetic that is very much at odds with the themes. There’s also the odd decision to put yellow text on a pastel-pink background for what I might call Mrs Magic’s “rant section”, as opposed to the much more potent (not to mention legible) black-on-yellow of We Never Change’s rant section.
But to get at what really weirds me out about Mrs Magic, we’ll need to dig into the themes. The lyrics to Strawberry Guy’s song, which are mostly written out by hand in MoonXplorer’s track, are sad and melancholy but also rather vague. However, according to the description, MoonXplorer seems to be attempting to wrestle these lyrics into a “letter” in response to “backlash over the way i create stuff”. This results in melancholic lyrics like “I don't know what I'm doing here” being drawn in all-caps with several exclamation points, and text such as “I’M DOING WHAT I WANT! AND Y’ALL WON’T STOP ME!” floating by the screen while Strawberry Guy wistfully sings “I can’t get back in”. It’s bizarre, and the existence of We Never Change only makes it more so. In my assessment, We Never Change is a slow-motion, pastel-drenched, heartfelt plea for us to see beyond petty arguments and dream of a better world, and Mrs Magic is an slow-motion, pastel-drenched, unfocused letter-to-my-haters where the message is, ultimately, “Fuck you, I do what I want!”. It makes me want to tell the creator of Mrs Magic to watch We Never Change and have a think, except they appear to be the same person. I can’t make sense of it.
A past version of me would have simply ended my review there, but I’m trying to be kinder and put my desire to build a better world into practice, so in the spirit of We Never Change, I want to ruminate on how things could be better. So, what would I like to see from MoonXplorer? Well, I’d like to see them do more interesting things with movement than simple left-to-right pencil sledding with basic music sync, and I’d like to see them put out work that is more varied in aesthetic. But those are minor things compared to what I want to see MoonXplorer make art about. I wish that they would focus on exploring their emotions and using art to process them, rather than merely using artmaking as a release valve for venting. I wish they would experiment with craft and concept and structure and style and make things that look and feel totally different. I wish they would slow down and think a little more on what they get out of artmaking and what kind of art they want to make, and why. But mostly, I wish they would stop trying to write half-assed, uninspired letters to their haters. We all deserve better than that.
Thanks for reading!