Mario Keytastrophe: Rebirth Edition
S.N.N. | 2017 | 36 Exits | Download Link
A remaster of an old romhack released back in 2007, this is a puzzle hack featuring many small rooms. The main concept of the hack is that the tools to solve these puzzles are plainly laid out for you to see, but combining them in the right way or the correct order isn’t always obvious. The levels use vanilla mechanics as well as custom blocks, and new elements are introduced at a constant pace throughout the hack. The custom mechanics are usually introduced in a tutorial puzzle, and then later iterated on in harder and harder variations, until the puzzles in the endgame, which feature multiple custom mechanics at once. While the puzzles have an intended way to solve them, the author purposefully did not try to proof them against breaks. This means that if you know more advanced techniques (such as shell- or keyjumping), you’ll be able to finish the majority of the puzzles quite quickly if you so choose.
Using Super Mario World as a base, puzzles are hard to pull off. In my memory, when I think of puzzle levels in older romhacks, I mostly remember the bad ones: Huge mazes of identical-looking sublevels, carrying items from one place to another, or puzzle levels which bizarrely also feature platforming segments, making failure particularly annoying. Using only small rooms as a setting for a puzzle neatly avoids all of those pitfalls. All of the information you need to find the solution is right there in front of you, the solution can always be achieved with only a couple of steps, and messing up doesn’t cost you a lot of progress. An additional benefit is that the puzzles pass by quite quickly, so if you don’t enjoy dealing with a particular custom gimmick, you’ll soon move on to the next one.
A disadvantage of designing puzzles only using tight spaces is that the difficulty of the puzzles naturally plateaus at a relatively easy level. After all, it’s impossible to come up with a complex sequence using only the limited space available. This means that for experienced players who are already familiar with both the vanilla game mechanics and the custom gimmicks, this hack might not pose much of a challenge. For anyone else though, this hack is a very good way to get used to the way (good) puzzles are generally designed in SMW hacks. Unless you’re playing these hacks purely for the platforming, I’d recommend checking this one out.