And Boogie Wonderland is done! Ludwig took just shy of two hours (1:55 to be exact), and then the escape took another 5 minutes. Very intense boss fight! It's no GPW2 Bowser, but few things are.
Overall I'd say I really liked about half of this hack, and the rest I just kinda pushed through. There's a massive spike in both difficulty and level length about halfway through, which I would've liked to have been more gradual. You get comfortable in the first half, and then it gets a lot more grindy. Outside of the final two levels, I don't think I spent more than an hour anywhere, but in the first half of the hack I was clearing sections in 5-10 minutes. Later on it got closer to 30-45 minutes at times, or longer in the cape level I mentioned in my previous post.
You can really tell that Baba was trying to make GPW Junior with this hack. That's not a bad thing, but the influence is definitely there. Many levels feel like riffs on ones from either GPW game. Some jumps are very, very tight, and many of them could've benefited from an extra indicator -- especially in the second half of the game, there are a lot of blind jumps and obstacles you can't really clear without dying to them once. None of this makes a hack bad, but I found myself getting a little tired of it by the end. It's unfortunate, because I really did like the first half, and there are a lot of cool sections in the second half too. There's just maybe too much of everything? A bunch of levels have more than two sections, which almost always feels a little excessive to me. Granted, all of those sections are exploring a unique idea, but it just gets to be a lot after a while.
I feel like I'm sounding like I'm down on the hack, which I'm not -- ultimately I think a lot of it was pretty great, but there's just a lot of it. It kinda feels like Baba wanted to come out of the gate and really establish himself as a creator from the get-go, showing all his ideas (granted, I don't know how much changed in the 2.0 update). And he's got a ton of them! Even through the very long final castle, there were a bunch of fun rooms. I think at the end of the day what I wanted was either more consistency in the difficulty/level length, or a more gradual ramp in the progression. It's a very good hack! Just shy of being a great hack, for me.