7. (Tie) “Filtration System” by FYRE150

Earning full marks from judge GlitchCat7, “Filtration System” by FYRE150 focuses on atypical, exciting uses of water, and switch blocks players must trigger to alter the water’s properties. The first section sees Mario swimming through pillars of water that swap properties with deadly blue lava whenever a switch is hit. The second is a more traditional tide level, with water rising and falling from the top and bottom of the screen. The final section has you precariously climbing the level using water that’s shifting on both sides of the screen, putting you in precarious positions as you must often hit a switch at the last instant to avoid leaping into a wall of lava.

A constant motif throughout the level lies in the difficult ways you have to exit the water, a design challenge which has more subtlety than it seems. The concepts in the level are a continuation of ideas FYRE explored in an earlier hack. He says, “‘Filtration System’ was sort of an amalgamation of stuff from my recent hack Purgatory; i.e. the tileset was from one level, the palette was from another, and the mechanic was a variation of an idea I had already explored in another level.”