PROS

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the concept and level design, it's stunning to look at, visually impressive, and the execution of the abstract non-Euclidean geometry is endlessly cool to me as someone who loves the concept of liminality and limited infinities. I can look at every part of each level and see how much love and care went into crafting it to have a very specific feel to it, and I was ecstatic seeing all of the cool new development skills Hakita wanted to show off within this layer.

THE POWERS. Oh my GOD I love them. Ever since the introduction of the Council I was highly interested in the other types of angels and their hierarchy along with the kinds of personalities and fighting styles that would be associated with the different virtues and beliefs of each archangel, and the powers ended up scratching that itch PERFECTLY for me. This counts as a bit of a side rant, but because of my interest in the angels, naturally as someone who loves making fan creations, I made a couple angel ocs of my own, one of them being Eden. Eden took the place of a daughter for Gabriel, being a human who he took from one of the Earthmovers during new peace to attempt to create a disciple who would listen to his version of holiness as opposed to the views of the council. (It was his miniature way of playing god, a clear stroke of narcissism in a way.) Eden, who was 17 at the time that Gabriel took her from Earth, naturally followed him and believed all of his teachings, having been shown the divine light of an angel, she believed it to be the true meaning of life and existence. All of that is to say that my idea of what a child of Gabriel would act like is SPOT on. The way that they hold a certain cockiness about them that they adopted from him, while still managing to hold him above themselves in every line of dialogue. They are cocky FOR him. They believe him to be as great as he believed himself to be in the first act, naive and overzealous. I absolutely adored the powers for being exactly what I had envisioned them to be, overcome with the exact same rage and self-righteousness that their father held before he found his true purpose through something new: failure.

The Lore. Good lord we got so much lore from this layer. There was a lot of it that I haven't had the time to deliberate on yet, the sculpture of god, the new amalgamations, the creatures of hell LEARNING from the beings of heaven and what they create... There's a lot here that I might go into later in another post, but for now I'll leave it be because I really want to get a grasp on everything that we got dumped on us in this layer before I form a solid opinion on the additional narrative.

Other little things I loved:

V1'S REFLECTION!! i'm so so happy that we properly get to see v1 in game outside of the secret levels.

blue skull in toilet. made me giggle and i repeated "put he in the terlet..." until my friends got tired of me

THE ARCHANGEL DESIGNS... AUUGGHH IM FROTHING AT THE MOUTH IM SO EXCITED TO SEE ALL THE ART THAT WILL BE MADE OF THEM!!

The incredible sound design, as always

The elevators! i love elevators! I love pushing elevator buttons!

Now unfortunately, as good as this layer was and how hype I still am about everything that was delivered, nothing is all upsides.

CONS

The gameplay. I know its insane to say this, but I actually didn't much care for the gimmick in this layer. I understand that the entire point of Fraud as both a concept and a gameplay element is that it is supposed to be confusing and disorienting, but there comes a point where it stops being frustrating in the "I need to get better to understand this gameplay mechanic!" way, and starts being frustrating in the "I'm getting a migraine from my camera freaking out and clipping through walls every time the gravity switches." There were certain times in this layer that I genuinely started feeling nauseous at all of the spinning and warping and flipping, and I'm not the type to easily get motion sick at video games. This is not to mention the air fight section. I'm not sure if it's just a personal gripe, or if this is a common opinion amongst Ultrakill players, but I absolutely HATE fighting in the air. The essential mechanics that were first taught to you in the tutorial and first few layers were designed to keep you on the ground: limited wall jumps, limited dashes, and getting rewarded for keeping a foot on the ground. Now, I'm not talking about air fights where you're getting airborn combo multipliers, getting a few wall jumps followed by dashes, whiplashing to virtues or mindflayers back and forth for a bit, that's fine. I'm talking about shit like the segment in 1-E. you know which one. The final fight against Geryon felt like a longer, worse controlled and more slippery version of the mindflayer + virtue room in 1-E, it's just that instead of being able to rely on the skills you already know, you have to rely on an incredibly disorienting and completely new movement system, and you get the little band-aid fix of having providence orbs for a quick health refill.

The mirror reaper was just... Eh. It didn't feel boss-like at all to me. Saw trap + projectile boost just kind of killed it instantly, and because of the amount of AOE, it's invisibility in the second phase was kind of just a nothing burger. I did really enjoy the death catchers though. The concept of a false idol intrigues me and I like the way that it was executed. I wish that it was a bit more obvious what the condition to disable/kill it was though, as in the first room I was stuck shooting at it and killing the same enemies over and over again because I hadn't connected it with the thought of an idol, I had connected it with the thought of the trees of life from Violence.

Other minor gripes:

too much guttertank. hate gutter tank....

the visual clutter was a LOT this layer. Having attacks that span across entire rooms (providence projectiles) causes a lot of visual confusion and disorientation imo

VERY buggy. i know that this is day 1 of release for the update, but it was my first time unintentionally glitching through the map entirely and falling all the way down to the respawn box.

All around, I think that Layer 8 was still a very fun experience, and I loved playing it, I'm still going to go back and P-rank all of this layer on standard and then on violent, so don't take my words as hateful in any way. I love Ultrakill, and I love seeing new content of it every single time we get even a little update, let alone a whole new layer. I think that if anything, I'd want a little smoothing to make it feel like less of a nightmare to play in the physical-nausea-and-headache-inducing way.

On another note, I've already pre-ordered my Minos plushie!! He will be going right next to Gabe, V1 and V2 on my bed.

That's all for now!