Is it me or does old srb2 have a weird but kinda cool "liminal space" feel ?

I was gonna ask this question in another thread
but I feel as if this can stand on its own as a topic

Sometimes it can, though that's not a trait that's gone from more recent versions. Mostly the difference with newer versions, especially 2.2.x, is the amount of detail in the game has increased and the overall artstyle has shifted much more towards a 90's cartoon vibe. Older versions of SRB2 such as the Final Demo versions had a tendency for levels to not have a ton of detail built in and to mostly amount to flat, blocky locations that feel much more surreal, especially due to the lack of real slopes. You can get a similar feeling from playing a lot of DOOM levels.

time gear said:

Sometimes it can, though that's not a trait that's gone from more recent versions. Mostly the difference with newer versions, especially 2.2.x, is the amount of detail in the game has increased and the overall artstyle has shifted much more towards a 90's cartoon vibe. Older versions of SRB2 such as the Final Demo versions had a tendency for levels to not have a ton of detail built in and to mostly amount to flat, blocky locations that feel much more surreal, especially due to the lack of real slopes. You can get a similar feeling from playing a lot of DOOM levels.

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Fair point, I didn't think about that

Also now thinking about it, the corridor like levels usually has some old doom vibes (I think, I don't play a lot of doom)

yes. demo 2, due to having all the planned levels despite most of them being ufinished, is full of these. more specifically techno hill act 2, deep sea act 2, mine maze act 2, and both acts of dark city.

time gear said:

Older versions of SRB2 such as the Final Demo versions had a tendency for levels to not have a ton of detail built in and to mostly amount to flat, blocky locations that feel much more surreal, especially due to the lack of real slopes. You can get a similar feeling from playing a lot of DOOM levels.

Click to expand...

There were also the limitations of the engine and the size of the levels it could make back then, the SRB2 engine pre 2.0 could not even come close to what it can handle now. That probably contributed to a lot of beta levels being maze-like, because it was an easy way to make them longer without using too much more of the design space.

Heck Mine Maze (according to Glaber's pack) did not even use an FoF for the 'bridge' near the beginning, but used an older method of faking elevated platforms with tightly packed midtextures. I would think it could've been because the engine was not near as optimized either combined with the hardware of the day, even now there are tricks you can do with midtextures to eliminate the need for some FoF's to have sides and speed up rendering.