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  • Breather Level: The final level of Back for Seconds, "All the Way Down", is separated into four segments. Of the four, the third, "Solar System Snack", is the easiest. Few things can hurt you on contact, and the only actively aggressive enemies are easy to predict flying saucers. Even its hard variant is barely harder, as only the four very slow gas giants and the immobile Sun can kill you, providing a respite between the numerous enemies of "From Ants to Tanks" and the long Everything Trying to Kill You that is "Final Frontier".
  • Crosses the Line Twice: In Tasty Planet Forever, one of the plotlines follows a dingo through Australia. What's the alternative skin, you ask? A baby.
  • Growing the Beard: While the first game is by no means bad, it is its sequel Back for Seconds that established several of the gameplay principles that would become staples to the series, such as a more diversified gameplay, time being unlimited per level (although with thresholds to beat for medals), larger screens, levels progressing between stages of increasing size, and a final Marathon Level at the end of each chapter.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: Forever can feel like this, as it's difficult to get even a single star out of three when playing casually (or even when you're not). It doesn't help that if you take too long, the time bonus turns into a time penalty and counts against your final score.
  • Spiritual Adaptation: Can be described as "Scale of the Universe" as a video game rather than just an interactive ruler.
  • That One Level:
    • The first game features a few irritating whole worlds.
      • While the Ocean world is very short and has a simple set of objects consisting of three fishes, a dolphin and a shark, they vary a lot in size. And because their thin and long shapes are very distinct from the Grey Goo's round one, it's hard to know which ones you can eat. Not helping is that any of them bigger than you will chase and eat you. The younger scientist might have been right about throwing the Grey Goo into the ocean, after all.
      • Most of the Cosmos world's levels share the Ocean's Everything Trying to Kill You principle and confusing ways to distinguish which objects are larger or smaller than you, but at least they don't actually chase you. Except for the supermassive amoeba that devour entire superclusters, and explode in size when they do.
      • When it comes to individual levels, Cosmos 4, the level with the black hole, is particularly hard to beat in timed mode. Being too close to the black hole as you're eating stars risks you colliding with it and dying, and being too far away from it makes it harder to eat incoming stars since they'll be further apart. To get the gold medal, you must be very aggressive.
    • In Back for Seconds:
      • There are a few levels where you have to race against other creatures to eat enough stuff before they eat it all and cause you to fail the level. The first one of this kind, "Rice Mice" is particularly infamous because you're up against a pair of mice that move very fast. It's also a main story level so it's possible to get stuck on it. "Fast Cats" is even more difficult, as you must eat all 20 rats before the four cats eat any. Even if you memorize the pattern to follow around each circle of rats to eat them before the cats do, your margin for mistakes remains a fraction of a second before a cat eats either you or a rat.
      • The hard version of "Machinelaser" is a nighmare. Like its normal counterpart, it pits you against fast cats equipped with More Dakka, with a need to be constantly on the move to avoid the flurry of lasers. Unlike its normal counterpart, not only do the cats kill you on contact if you're smaller, as to be expected in a "Hard" level, but so do their lasers! One single mistake and you will have to restart, and the bigger you are, the harder it is to avoid the lasers...
    • In Forever, "Get To Bee Choppah", a bonus level with the bee, is a nightmare to beat with three stars. The level has quickly-respawning helicopters and fighter jets which move fast, can hurt you with their propellers, and fill the screen with heat-seeking missiles and bullets to near Bullet Hell levels. The more you grow, the harder it is to avoid the sheer quantity of projectiles aimed at you, and getting hit even once means a significant penalty to your size and score. Good luck trying to even win this level on Deadly difficulty, as the propellers become lethal on touch!
  • Unconventional Learning Experience: The games not only include a wide variety of objects from biological subjects such as flora and fauna, they also feature various units of length (including astronomical units and parsecs), things that would be surprising for 8-year-olds (and up)note  to learn. Back for Seconds takes it further with its history-related aspects.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: According to our favourite online Great Big Book of Everything, it's targeted at 8-year-olds (and up). Sweet Dreams, kids!

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