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  • Awesome Music: The music in this game is very good. You can listen to it here.
  • Breather Boss: After the hell that you had to endure from the rest of BlackCastle, the second battle against Shakespeare is a much needed breather. It's still a tough fight, but much easier than the the area leading up to him. The boss himself is also arguably easier than he was during his first fight in a couple of ways: He foregoes the flurry of shadows from each side of the screen, an attack that would be especially hard to avoid with the very narrow, 2 tile wide arena this second fight provides you with, for just teleporting more frequently, after each attack, with his positions always being telegraphed in advance and often coming in the same order per phase, rather than the Random Number God headache that was having to deal with the former attack's random elevations, and each attack phase goes by significantly quicker too. Plus, you're given a save point right before said second fight, even on Masterful, while you had to go through the entirety of The Curtain to retry the first fight, which is just the cherry on top. Right afterwards is the Final Climb and the incredibly long Final Boss.
  • Breather Level:
    • BlancLand. After the Checkpoint Starvation of DeepDive, not only does it have an abundance of checkpoints, the platforming is quite tame in order to not make the Interface Screw gimmick overstay its welcome, and the boss is incredibly simple to beat.
    • LongBeach is a welcomed reward for thrudging through either DeepDive or DarkGrotto. No enemies, calming music, culminating in a small Exposition Dump at the end of the area that unlocks the ability to enter The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, though you likely won't have enough golden orbs to go further than the second screen.
  • Fan Nickname: Nothing in the game except for the levels, the items, and two bosses have canon names, so these are inevitable.
    • The two bosses with canon names are Fluffy, the boss of Cloud Run, and the ninja, whose name is Shakespeare. (If you check the source code, the font he uses in his pre-boss cutscenes is called "fnt_shakespeare")
    • Bandit, which refers to the bird with the bandit mask, appears as a signature on several signposts across the world, too.
  • Goddamned Bats: Any and all ghosts. Also the laser turrets in FireCage. Most of the enemies are pretty easy to deal with, though.
  • Goddamned Boss:
    • The boss of Skysand. Its "Bullet Hell lite" isn't too bad, but you have to defeat it by making its floating sword hit its body, which is much harder to do than it sounds, and the sword's attack phase occurs in long intervals. And every time you want to fight it, you have to traverse a few rooms which require some training to get through unscathed and in which everything deals heavy damage. It feels very satisfying to finally defeat it, though.
    • The boss of The Curtain, Shakespeare the ninja, fits this trope to a T. He's not too difficult to defeat, but dying to him means you have to go back through multiple screens of difficult platforming because of the Checkpoint Starvation in that area.
    • The third phase of the Final Boss is aggravating in a similar way to the boss of SkySand. You have to keep dodging deceptively hard to avoid Homing Projectiles mixed in with lasers for almost 3 whole minutes on the hardest difficulties, as each hit makes the boss walk painfully slow for longer and longer before it decides to stop in the middle to do the one attack that leaves it vulnerable to damage, a screen sweeping Wave-Motion Gun that also starts out homing at your position, all while there's still lingering projectiles making dodging things harder. There's nothing worse than dying to a stray energy ball on the third hit and having to do 5 minutes worth of a boss fight all over again.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The game's tagline, "You're an egg..." became a lot funnier after Maddy Thorson came out as non-binary in 2019.note 
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The save point jingle.
    • The sound of the heart doors opening.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The purple ghosts — dog-like purple beasts that are invincible, appear randomly, and their appearance is marked by the screen turning purple and the music changing. If a bird leaves Skytown, these things come for them. Two birds get carried off before your eyes by these monsters. After seeing them in cutscenes, they're able to come after you.
    • The Bottom. No enemies, only a white background and wooshing "music". And no way out other than the save point.
    • DarkGrotto is pretty terrifying if you're not expecting it. The bodies of four bird explorers who came before you — and got annihilated by the ghosts and DarkRed — can be found down there.
  • Paranoia Fuel: After one of two events occur on any difficulty higher than Simple, there is a particular type of enemy that can appear out of nowhere at any time. It is large. It is invincible. It chases you regardless of where you are on the screen. It passes through walls. It can even appear on screens that have a save point and while you're in the middle of a tough platforming challenge. Sometimes, more than one of it appears at a time. Its appearance is accompanied by the screen taking on a shadowy purple tint and the music becoming creepy. About the only (admittedly, large) comfort is that you can get rid of it by simply traveling between screens. If the ghosts make you paranoid, you might want to avoid FireCage for as long as you can, as beating it triggers the ghosts to start appearing.
  • Surprise Difficulty: Don't let the game's charming feel and MS Paint visuals fool you: this game was created by the same person who created the Jumper series and would later create Celeste, and the difficulty from those games certainly carry over into this one.
  • That One Boss: Some of the bosses are pitifully easy. Some of them are... not.
    • In order to beat Dark Red, you need to deflect two (or more, on higher difficulties) of his fireballs at the same time. Which is only possible if you're two platforms away from him, and it takes a bit of practice to do that. And even then, you can only let the shot loose at the last second. Not to mention he's in a Blackout Basement...
    • Fluffy wouldn't be so hard except for the fact that you can only stand on a few small platforms that constantly fall when you're on them. And falling off makes you suffer huge damage. Injuring him is no easy task either.
    • The second battle with Shakespeare the ninja is no fun either. The boss in question keeps teleporting in right on top of you to wing his gear shuriken at your head, and the ground below your little platform is covered in spikes.
    • StoneEye. It fires many projectiles and energy barriers in a shaft that's only a few times the width of your sprite.
    • FireMachine. Try jumping through gaps in an energy beam when there's four of them at once, some that open and close rapidly. And a bunch of projectiles, too.
  • That One Level:
    • The final dungeons, full stop. Aggravating, especially difficult spike mazes that dish out huge damage and are tough to see, let alone avoid, and a very small number of save points means that even the slightest mistakes will cost you dearly. And on harder difficulties, there are even fewer of them.
    • The Curtain, especially if your platforming skills aren't up to snuff. The slightest mistake will set you back several screens. The challenge of the area combined with its Checkpoint Starvation will make you want to tear your hair out. It doesn't help that the area is pretty much just as hard on Simple as it is on Difficult.
  • That One Sidequest: Getting the best reward from the RainbowDive minigame. Not only do you have to collect practically every star, you have to utilize a quirk the game never tells you: shooting a star earns 15 points. Fail to collect them and you have no choice but to run all the way back to the save point at the bottom and warp back up to try again.

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