Gui told me on twitter that I should come back to this episode and listen to it. He said he was worried that I didn't make a forum post commenting on his talk on Christian Whitehead's magnum opus.
It's almost like he missed me.
Sonic Mania does have bottomless pits. this is most frequent in stages like Flying Battery, both act 1's of Mirage Saloon (Knuckles gets his own stage!), and Oil Ocean. they didn't outright eliminate Pit Death entirely like Sonic CD did, but I think they did their best to avoid the problems that the DiMPS developed sonic games have.
Which of course, leads into that marketing blurb; speed. yes, there should be setpieces that promote this, but the secret to sonic is that at it's most ideal, speed is marketing BS and the real thing that is tangible is Momentum; not just the the strict Newtonian definition of it, but also the metaphysical game design end of it. you'll hear a lot of sonic fans talk about liking Sonic games for the idea of momentum. The idea that you earn the speed and hwne you've built up game knowledge, the speed feeds into you being able to blaze through levels thanks to committing it to muscle memory. Likewise, an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and so when you get stopped, when you get sent to that lower path of the multi-tiered level design and you start sucking, the likes of S3&K start to do rude things to you.
There's decidedly a lot less of that in Sonic Mania. coming to rest, that is, having the game flow halted. there's so many spots where I get going through a section, roll through a hill and mostly make it out OK, and have my 'momentum' halted by missing a special stage ring or missing the quickly falling platform speed put me up by to maintain the upper route rather than the game literally brick-walling me.
A lot of the time, I find myself using the 'cool bonus' in levels as a metric for how I do when playing sonic mania (for the record, cool bonus is the measure of how many times you've allowed yourself to get hit period. it starts at 10,000 points and gets reduced by 1000 per hit).
Still, Sonic Mania is a joy, even if it isn't as taxing of a 'track memorization' as the games that came before it. Some Sonic fans can be outright nitpicky of Mania (particularly people don't like Egg reverie or have a few other VERY minor complaints), but it breathed life into people who were so done with Sonic and it proved the mettle of a generation of developers who cut their teeth on game development through deep academic symposium via fandom internet forums with a healthy dose of passion for the heroes for whom they have deconstructed and build over again and again and again.
It's an experience I've been living the past several months.