Ooh, this was very, very satisfying. I found it via
yohji's rec in the Favourite Levels thread here.
I love the tileset... no idea what the original looked like, and how much was your work vs in the original, but between picking it & tweaking it for the level, it really worked perfectly. The gloomy darkness, the green working with the shapes of the broken, irregular or 'aqueduct' (the passages too small for Knytts to fit in) tiles and the raindrop effects to suggest both age and dampness, even dankness... the ambiance & music... everything, just everything, felt as though it didn't just fit but
belonged together. Even, once I encountered them, the
things other than keys which were not green. OMG the red was so creepy, all the more so because it
remained unexplained! I was totally expecting some grotesque Knytt-eating monster, maybe behind a barrier so it couldn't reach Juni, but still. Of course once you set up an expectation like that the suspense just remains, and even increases, the longer there's no sign of the 'monster' (or whatever the scary thing is expected to be) itself.
About the tiles which were sometimes obstacles and sometimes background, I didn't have a problem with it; for the few tiles you chose to do it with, it made sense. And I actually liked the intro screen being just the pattern of blocks, and the ending
being either exactly the same or very similar in appearance; it gave the level a very self-enclosed, encapsulated feel. After all... what if Juni didn't escape yet? That is, what if she escaped that level of maze-like dungeon, only to find herself still lost (presumably) underground? Kind of like that one thriller movie with the people trying to escape the maze, only even when they seem to have 'solved' it they still aren't free yet.
I also deeply appreciated the way you varied the arrangements of tiles, and used certain tiles sparingly, to serve as landmarks for the attentive player. At one point I thought I was hopelessly lost, but eventually I realised I recognised where I was again. Though by the time I got all four keys, I no longer recognised
the original savepoint screen (spoilered that since the other savepoints aren't encountered until some ways into the level) and went right past it, only realising where I was when I couldn't exit the room to the left.
Putting the key I found first -- the yellow one IIRC -- in a relatively easy-to-find and close-to-the-start-screen room was a nice touch from a level-design standpoint; for me, it gave me the false impression that all the keys would be within the same approximate number of screens from the start screen, while other players who went deeper into the dungeon and found the other three keys probably never thought it might have been up there so close to the start screen! I also wonder how many people found where to use the keys before finding all the keys, the way I did...
All in all a lovely level. Must remember to add it to the recs list in the League of Crap Players thread.