I considered putting a savepoint, but realized that that would make it too easy because the player could just grab a creature, save, grab a creature, save, etc. Looking at it now, I could probably stick a savepoint behind a 40-creature block so that someone can't straight cheese the level, but this isn't really made to be a very well-designed level at all, and something about the way it is now... appealing to me, despite the fact that it goes directly against my method of designing levels (
Deep Freeze has checkpoints on almost every screen and sometimes has
two checkpoints in one screen, that's how much I hate making players redo stuff they've already done). Perhaps it's as you say, though - developing a strategy (since there are so many ways to approach it, and randomization constantly forces you to adapt), the satisfaction of reducing your threats down to zero, the very real feeling of risk, it's a surprisingly enjoyable level for something that was designed as a haphazard joke. It highlights both the benefits and detriments, in my opinion, of KS's enemy roster focusing so extremely on random elements - random position, random projectile spread, random projectile speed, random projectile firing rate. All in all, an interesting experiment that turned out better than I expected!
I giggled pretty hard at your excitement, thank you for that.
I gave your post a star before you edited it to add the spoiler (which itself seems to have been edited a few times) and now I'm wishing I could give your post a second star and I want tea.