Level Video
Temperate Unearthly Biome is a ghost house stage with spooky atmosphere. It’s set in a haunted town where you start on the rooftops outside, descend into one of the buildings and climb back out, evading various undead along the way.
Lots of care has been put into the aesthetic. There’s a grayscale filter in place so it will be colorless no matter who you’re playing as. Background elements are used to emphasize the dilapidation, with vines creeping up support columns and numerous plants overgrowing the structure. Even the platforms are affected in several places with the tiles slightly offset from each other to create gentle slopes to the floorboards. Since the enemies are mostly white, they stand out among the details and don’t get lost in visual noise. In terms of looks, the stage really comes together well.
Sadly, the platforming side is suffering a little. The pseudo-sloped floors create navigation problems for enemies and the player. Dry Bones will stumble off the bridge tiles, falling right through the floor. This doesn’t seem to affect the player the same way, but if you’re moving between tiles when you try to jump, you’ll fail since you’re technically airborne for a frame or two. I guess it’s kind of appropriate for a collapsing building to require more careful movement, but it clashes with the game’s default mechanics and will catch you off guard if you don’t know to look out for it. This could be partially alleviated by keeping the edge tiles of each platform level with each other so the player always has a 64-pixel space to jump from instead of 32.
Of greater concern is one of the levels most prominent foes: the Stretches, which are those SMB3 Boo block thingies where Boos pop out and slide to and fro before shlooping back inside. As a hazard, they work just fine since they’re an accurate recreation. The main issue is that they can’t be spin jumped upon, which is different from other ghosts in SMBX and a royal pain in a stage where so many floors are infested by them. I couldn’t get a beat on when they appear or vanish either, so crossing their platforms felt like it was up to randomness whether it would be safe to land, and if so, for how long. Between their unpredictable behavior and disregard for spin jumps, they make the stage much more difficult than it would otherwise be.
But even with those caveats, it’s a pretty good stage. The sections are of reasonable length with regular checkpoints. There are three Star Coins to collect and it’s not too tough to get them, though it may take a couple tries since their placement isn’t totally obvious. It doesn’t go overboard with enemies apart from Stretches, which are still positioned fairly and wouldn’t be such a big deal if not for what I mentioned. There are enough power-ups that you can afford to make a few mistakes, so that eases those troubles as well.
Overall, this stage offers a decent challenge in an atmospheric environment that’s surprisingly mellow for a ghost house. Some parts may prove difficult, but it’s easy enough to bounce back and try again.
