I have a lot to say about this one. It's got a lot of hype surrounding it and it definitely lives up to the hype. its polish is on par with hacks like redesign and hyper.
I'll start with the good things. The level design and creative use of vanilla assets is astounding this is a really slick looking hack and is a testament to the creative ability of the maker, and of how truly great the original super metroid is.
the level design is sprawling and chock full of secrets and creative places to hide power ups. This hack will keep you guessing and completely throws the original progression out the window in favor of a more open ended progression near the end.
The story is fantastic told purely through clever level progression and through some sparse text information that is laid out when you find the map stations of all things. I'm sure there are hacks that have used this strategy before but this one actually gives you a reason to check them for more info on story elements.
now for the bad stuff: This hack has a really lopsided difficulty curve. It starts off punishingly difficult. especially when you reach tchernobog. The enemies are numerous, pitfalls are constant and power ups are so sparsely spread that it won't be until you complete this area and move onto the next that you will finally feel comfortable exploring without the fear of just being instakilled from taking a wrong turn into the wrong room.
the idea that this hack is vanilla difficulty is laughable i would label it as advanced difficulty. You will struggle without advanced knowledge of bomb jumping, and wall jumping. there are frequently places in the game that you will get stuck in forcing you to reload saves if you aren't able to execute advanced movement tech. Once I defeated draygon however i found that the difficulty curve drops to nothing. at this point the enemies you face will not be a challenge and it only gets easier which makes collecting the final power ups pretty pointless. By the time you face ridley you can easily defeat him with just varia and maybe screw attack and you dont even need the gravity suit to complete the game. I did find the thing but it was so far away from the actual game progression that searching for it was a waste of time. You spend so little time traversing waterlogged passageways that having it is not necessary.
what really tripped me up is this games insistence on intentional death or restarts in order to find certain powerups. You'll know what i mean once you play it but i can't explain for spoiler reasons.
overall I really did enjoy this hack the ending was a surprise and really interesting as it doesn't follow the trope of the escape sequence. I highly recommend this to everyone interested in another super metroid adventure. This one really does the game justice.
Exploration],
rated by radish on Nov 24, 2020 (
