I'll keep doing that, then -- apologies for not spoilering the exit count sooner, I hope I didn't wait too long to start doing it.
Anyway, I won't have to keep doing it for much longer, because I'm nearly at the end now. I only really played for an hour tonight, but going by my exit count (and an educated guess that the final level doesn't count as an exit), I think I have two levels left (currently at 40 exits).
I'm gonna get this out of the way, and because we talked about it a little when you were streaming, I don't think it's a spoiler anymore to say we all know there's A Puzzle, right? So, I'm done with the puzzle. I'd actually solved a good chunk of it on my own, too, with a very gentle but very helpful hint from revolug along the way. But while I was searching for something else in one of ThirdWall's VODs, I accidentally hit play right at the point where he was doing the solution, so I unintentionally spoiled the end of it for myself. Whoops!
But that's not the main thing I want to talk about here. I want to talk about something that happened while I was doing the puzzle. Big spoiler warning about the rest of this post, so don't click in unless you don't care, etc. (I'm also gonna be talking about one specific facet of the puzzle itself to provide context.) Okay so. For the final piece of the puzzle, you're presented with a bunch of song lyrics that I interpreted as saying I needed to fly around the overworld while listening for something on the airship's radio. While doing so, I was mindlessly tapping the R button in time with the music, which I expected to do nothing since you can only land on actual level tiles. And then my jaw dropped, because while flying over an innocuous patch of forest, suddenly my airship was landing and Mario was standing on an unnamed overworld tile. Was there a level in there? Sure enough, there was. Just like some of the other secret levels that remixed GPW1/2 exits, this one was a super fresh take on Idle Hands that was very cool and just a little cursed. There's a lot of freezing sprites, throwing a key up, and then riding the key once it unfreezes and yeets itself towards the next part of the level. Absolutely hilarious boss at the end, too. As far as I'm aware, there are no hints in the game that this level even exists, but it counts as an exit, so it's necessary for a 100% clear.
I can't decide how I feel about having a level just randomly existing on the overworld that a lot of people might never even find. On the one hand, it was an incredible discovery and I'm glad I experienced it the way I did. On the other hand, for people who are really trying to play the game without any spoilers, how are they ever going to find this without breaking down and asking somebody? This is some extreme "my uncle who works at Nintendo says there's a secret level no one knows about" shit. I dunno! My experience in finding it was so cool that I can't outright say "this is a bad design choice", but at the same time there's at least a little bit of "c'mon, dude" going on. I'll have to think about it some more!
