Sonic Lost World - Wii U - Hidden World Zone 1

S-Rank Time: N/A Welcome to Hidden World. This is the equivalent of the bonus worlds in Super Mario games, like World 9 in New Super Mario Bros. Wii and such. I was expecting mega-tough stuff here, but they’re all gimmick-based instead--they feel like leftover concepts someone really wanted to put into the game but couldn’t find good places for. Well, enjoy the Play-Doh looking environments. Maybe. This one is undoubtedly one of the hardest stages in the game to figure out. Not necssarily the hardest to execute, mind you--I don’t think there is a single person who has played this game that will tell you that with any sincerity--but it is not obvious what you’re supposed to do at all. From the World Map, this stage resembles a Rubik’s Cube, only all of the center squares are orange, rendering it impossible to solve. When you actually get to the stage, you see it looks more like a 7x7x7 cube, and there are cube enemies hanging around ready to attack Sonic. The trick to this “puzzle“ is that it’s not actually a puzzle at all. You just survive until time runs out, and you then automatically clear the stage. You COULD just ignore the enemy near where Sonic begins and just let the timer run out, but that would be completely boring to watch, so I kept going for as long as I can. Destroying the cube enemies by pushing them off the stage yields seven to eleven animals. You then get 10 units added to your timer. Gravity then brings Sonic to another face of the cube this stage is made of and another enemy. Each enemy moves faster than the last, and they are invincible any time they are attacking or getting ready to attack. The attacks get faster too. The cube enemies can attack in four different ways: Any time you see it tilting, it is about to attack and is thus invincible. It will fall onto an adjacent tile, which causes some more tiles to flip over and damage Sonic if he touches them while moving. These different ways involve which tiles flip over. Sometimes, it’s just the next tile over. Sometimes, it’s the four tiles above, below, to the left, and to the right of the square it lands on. Sometimes, it’s the whole row over, and sometimes, it’s all four rows over. There may be a relationship between which attacks they are and the color of the cube, or maybe the color it lands on, but I haven’t looked into that yet. All in all, it seems like the purpose of this stage is to gather animals. It’s not a good source of them though, as you get more of them for less time at the circus bonus stages. Sonic never reaches the geodesic spheres that surround this stage, by the way. Requested by CheeYoung95