MAGMML3 #92 - Conveyance Of Directionality Strikes Again 

This level was so confusing to navigate on my first run, and this is coming from someone who figured out Temple of Light and Darkness pretty readily. It’s way more straightforward than it your first impression would seem, but you know what they say about your first impression. (And considering you made a straightforward level confusing to navigate… well I probably don’t need to say why that’s bad. And as much as I love Temple, I’d say the exact same thing about it.) A lot of it is owed to the fact that so many areas look way too open, so it feels like the level could go anywhere and thus never really funnels the player into a single direction. Biggest example is the first Magma/Solar Man room you get teleport to. Literally the entire right half of the room is just the insta-kill floor without a wall to tell you not to go that way. Yet for some reason the way forward only has a tiny “smaller than Mega Man sized” crack in one of the platforms to tell you that it IS the way forward. I also remember distinctly that I jumped into the pit in the first room (okay second; first room is just a spawn room) of the Sheep Man area because the switch blocks were sorta blocking the floor, and between either being on the wall or being on the floor, I thought this was the level’s say of conveying that there was a split path. Nope, I just jumped into the abyss! (Though at least the checkpoint was the room prior so I barely lost any time.) I’d also mention visual cohesion as a way to give the player a sense of semblance, but that’s something that gets thrown out the window pretty quickly. And not to say that it won’t and can’t work, but in a lot of cases it needs almost everything else to pick up the slack and that’s just not what happens here.