Basic Trope: A level that's much longer than the others.
- Straight: In Great Escape, levels usually take ten minutes to beat. Level 9 lasts forty minutes.
- Exaggerated: Level 9 takes four hours.
- Downplayed:
- In Great Escape, levels take around five minutes, but level 8 takes fifteen.
- Level 9 only takes the average player 40 minutes out of sheer difficulty. A skilled enough player could take 10 minutes to beat it, like every other level.
- Justified: The level in question is of major importance to the story of the game, and as such takes a longer amount of time to establish the fact that it signifies the end of a particular phase of "Great Escape".
- Inverted: Absurdly Short Level
- Subverted: Level 9 looks like it will take a long time. However, a Sprint Shoes item is provided, allowing it to be beaten much faster.
- Double Subverted: Level 10, on the other hand, is the same challenge without the Sprint Shoes.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Obstacles are added to Level 9 depending on your choices earlier in the game. Thus, it can either be really long or really short, depending on how you played up to this point.
- Level 4 takes five minutes, level 5 takes ten seconds, level 6 takes an hour, level 7 takes twenty minutes...
- Averted: Every level in Great Escape is of a similar length.
- Enforced: Playtesters found The Very Definitely Final Dungeon too anticlimactic and short, so the developers were forced to make it longer.
- Lampshaded:
- A Save Point has a prompt warning that the level will take a long time.
- On the level select, level 9 has a much bigger icon than the others.
- Invoked: The Big Bad continually drops obstacles in the player character's way, forcing them to take longer detours.
- Conversed: "This level has been going on for a really long time now. I'm starting to get tired."
- Implied: Bob is seen playing the level for five panels, the window in the background in each panel shows (respectively): sun-rise, noon, evening, night and sunrise again.
- Deconstructed: Players get frustrated that levels in Great Escape can be either really short or really long, as they don't know how much time they need in advance.
- Reconstructed: An Auto-Save feature is added, allowing players to save the game at any point.
It'll take a long time to get back to Marathon Level!
