Favourite Level Designs

Tell me about your favourite level designs and enemy compositions Holla Forums.

I love the way world 1-1 implicitly teaches the player to play SMB without explicitly telling them a single thing. This partly owes to the simple design of the nes controller being very intuitive, but we have standard control schemes now so modern games really have no excuse for sucking at level design.
By starting the level on the left hand side of the screen and leaving the rest of the screen largely empty, the player is encouraged to walk right by curiosity and learn that the game is played left to right. Introducing the mushroom and the goomba at the same time is a stroke of genius, as the player is again provoked by curiosity to jump at the question mark block even if they didn't suspect to avoid the goomba, and gets rewarded with the powerup.
The introduction the koopa as well is followed by lots of goomba to teach the player a moving koopa shell is dangerous, without having them suffer the consequences first.
Most basic mechanics in the game are showcased in this one level: hidden blocks, secret pipes, extra lives, coins, invincibility star and obviously the stairs to the flagpole encouraging you to jump as high as possible.
I wish more games would teach their mechanics implicitly like SMB instead of ham-fistedly explicitly like so many keep doing.

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Sonic 2's Emerald Hill 1/2 lets you nab all 7 emeralds right away if you gave a shit. Same with Mushroom Hill in &Chuckles

I'm very partial to Dark Souls level design. A lot of it is made in such a way to teach you what is approaching, most notably the hall leading to S&O.

The fight is two against one, assuming you don't summon an ally. Smough is giant sized and always tries to whack you with his hammer while Ornstein dashes in and out and shoots lightning when far away.
Leading up to the pair is two fights, assuming you have already opened the front door. The first is two large, slow sentry golems who use a variety of large area hitting abilities and make you dodge around a lot. They teach you a rudimentary concepts for the next chamber; you will fight two against one and these are patterns you face.
The next chamber is a long corridor, with two bigger sentry golems in a line, distant apart from each other. In addition to the previous pattern, they can stop to heal and they can do a charge up and release attack. When wearing heavy armour it can be difficult to dodge this charge up and release attack before you are damaged. It shares a similarity with Smough. The second golem also has a sniper up in a higher place who will fire arrows at you, in the same vein that Ornstein fires bolts of lightning if you get too far from him.
There are many more smaller details these encounters can teach you, such as maneuvering around the pillars to ensure you only fight one at a time, to prioritize a single target instead of distributing damage, how to dodge certain attack patterns, etc.

It's fairly well constructed.

Hitman 2 missions are all great pretty much, but a special one for me is Temple City Ambush. The others are more algorithmic in their execution, but here, you don't really have a set path to follow, because the assassins can be anywhere and also move, so you have to be alert at all times.

I'm a really big fan of the Undead Parish in DaS, specifically the part where you fight the armoured tusk. That whole section is designed as a panic run for the stairs or a really challenging fight with the crossbow projectiles.
The really cool part is that is that it works perfectly in reverse as a mid/low level challenge section if you travel through that way from the church. DaS' genius level design for me wasn't just that everything connects in a fluid way, but that the level design stays tight when approached from the different angles you can try it from.

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whoops

i fucked up.

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Yeah, I watched that Extra Credits episode, too.

I think Super Metroid did non-verbal communication even better. You can get anywhere in the map without a single line of text. It's all about the geometry and placement. + Small amounts of autism.

Nowhere did OP mention that trash series. Go and stay go.