Tartarus 100% (Extreme Demon) by Riot & more

The extent of my efforts to get this done can only be seen if we rewind to late July this year. I had gotten a new keyboard recently, and was feeling perhaps a bit too confident in my skill, so I wanted to do a new hardest. I probably spent a good few days looking at the 30-50 range on the list, trying to find something that wasn’t completely insufferable, yet I came up short. While there are certainly a few decent levels in that range, they either just didn’t catch my eye, or had extremely glaring issues that would make them awful (e.g. Verdant Landscape getting completely screwed over by 2.2). I would've gone for Delta, but that was barely even a new hardest, so I decided against it. Eventually, I decided that I would swallow my fears of a 5 minute long new hardest and play Damascus, since I loved basically everything about the level. Unfortunately, that plan ended up falling through because I found the first 20% to be far harder and worse than the rest of the level. I thought about it for a bit and for some reason I decided on Tartarus. This decision actually stuck which is a miracle since Tartarus is the epitome of anti-me gameplay (ship carried, first half heavy, boring from 0). I thought I might get a decent amount of enjoyment from it because of how similar it seemed to Thinking Space; it's an old impossible level, has really dumb gameplay throughout, and has one section that's marginally harder than the rest of the level. It didn’t seem like much of a jump in difficulty from Terminal Rampancy either. Sounds perfect, right...? Yeah no, I underestimated this level BIG TIME, and it ended up taking me 3 weeks to get past 64% once. I had to leave for vacation in about a week at that point, so I had to decide to either full send it, potentially not beating it in time, or just drop it. Thankfully, I chose the latter, which I'm so glad I did since I definitely needed a break. I didn't hate the level yet, and my mindset was super good, but I just wanted to play other stuff. I promised myself that once I got back, I'd dedicate nearly all of my playtime to getting better at the game in preparation for this level. Last weekend after beating Crimson Planet, I was bored with how slow my progression was with the levels I was beating to get better, so I just came back to Tartarus to, y'know, see what I could do without putting in too much effort. I played it for about 20 minutes and managed to get to the second half of the drop from 23, and I passed the predrop multiple times (which was the hardest part for me on keyboard). This gave me an insane confidence boost, and I grinded the level pretty much all weekend. The night before I had to go back to school, I got 97%, which kind of crushed me since I wouldn't be able to play for a few days. However, it was super expected so I couldn't be that mad. After a few sessions this weekend, I finally managed to pull off a completion, ending what has been my longest journey on a single level by far. I tried to write a really detailed and over-analytic review of the gameplay, but after looking back at what I wrote, none of it reflected my thoughts on the level very accurately. Additionally, this level’s flaws are so well known that I feel it would be a bit pointless to write about this level (and even if I was able to properly articulate my thoughts on the gameplay, I wouldn’t be able to fit any of it into the double-digit number of characters I have left in this description). To sum everything up, the first third is absolutely torturous, 31% and 45% are the worst choke points I’ve ever had to put up with, and everything else is relatively easy, just inconsistent. This is probably the most inconsistent level I've ever played. I also doubt that writing about this level would do it much justice. You have to play the level to understand why the gameplay is so agonizing. Luckily, I knew all of this going into the level, so I was able to enjoy the level a bit since it didn’t end up as my literal least favorite level in the game, which is about where my expectations were at. If I didn’t beat the level when I did, my enjoyment likely would’ve tanked quite a lot since the level was just starting to break me. Here’s a few other things I thought were worth noting: This is probably my last very difficult completion for a while, playing this level was genuinely horrible most days I beat this on vanilla GD; no cbf, no physics bypass, no nothing As of 10/19/24, this is the hardest demon completed by anyone in the Top 100 stars, with the previous level being Oblivion done by Volplay and Pouche (go support them they’re goated) For those curious, here’s all of my list percent deaths (64+): 64% (new best) 72% x2 73% x3 75% x5 (new best) 79% (new best) 81% (new best) 91% 97% (new best) 15 total Enjoyment: 5/10 Level rating: 0/10 Attempts: 33,070 Worst fail: 97% List placement: 39