Automatic Level
A Gimmick Level in a Platform Game (or other action type of video game) which uses elements of the game's physics to play itself to completion while the player just watches with hands off the controls. The effect is somewhat like a Rube Goldberg Device transportation device.
Automatic levels are rarely part of any official game release; they are more typically created by users with Level Editors.
A lesser variation is the 'Hold Right' level, which the player can beat by simply holding the right key and nothing else.
Please note that cutscenes and Attract Modes are not automatic levels. They don't have to do with guns or Character Levels, either. Also disqualified are Programming Games where the characters' actions can't be controlled in any case. See also Black Mesa Commute.
- Many fan-created Super Mario World levels make careful use of note blocks, conveyor belts, obstacles and moving platforms to achieve this, usually with the intent of making the noises made go along with the beat of a song.
- "Hands-Off House" for Glider 4.0, and "AutoPilot" for Glider PRO.
- There are tons of these for N. They tend to be almost as awesome as those based on Super Mario World.
- The Flash game Free Rider and its 'sequel', Free Rider 2, have lots of fan-made automatic levels.
- LittleBigPlanet has plenty of these, too, mostly in the form of Rube Goldberg Devices.
- ZZT occasionally sees these, probably starting with the Island Escape sequence in the first "Best of ZZT" collection.
- In Track Mania, so-called "press forward" tracks are these. All you have to do is... press forward. None exist in the game itself, though, so you'll have to make them yourself.
- In Breakout/Arkanoid style game called Rebound, there's a level that does that. It even instructs you not to touch anything. Of course, if you're smart you can interrupt the level and finish it yourself, for massive points.
- Progress Quest is an entire automatic game.
- The last elevator level in Three in Three will solve itself after only a single mouse click. Unfortunately, it's not the single mouse click you think it is...
- In Mega Man X, there's a section of Sigma's first fortress that's full of springs. The springs launch you toward the ceiling when you step on them, making the section rather difficult, but if you just use the dash feature you bounce from spring to spring avoiding enemies and zooming past the lasers, landing at the end without a scratch.
- The controls in Kinect Joy Ride felt strange for one player, who later recorded himself sitting still in one race.
- The player-made 'Vertical Vehicle' level in VVVVVV requires only one button press to click past a trinket-get screen and otherwise acts on its own.