I didn't have any better ideas for my 150th hack, and I wanted to play it anyway, so for most of the past week I played Beautiful Dangerous (which seems to be getting a lot of love from the community). I had to take a couple days off due to a migraine, but I wrapped it up today. Overall I'd say it was a very, very good hack, worth playing for sure, though not without some issues.
First, some well-earned praise: so much care and polish went into the hack. It looks and feels great (which is what you'd hope to see in a hack 1.5 years in the making). Lots of variety in the level types, lots of fun platforming to be had. In 20 exits, pretty much every one of them is unique. There's very little repetition of ideas or even setups, which really speaks to how much time went into its creation. And even with that, setups are typically very readable; I had very few spots where I said "what the hell am I supposed to do here?" When a section or level is good, it's often very good.
So what are the issues I had, then? Let's start with the biggest one: section length. If you've seen any discussion of the hack, you may know that shovda upped the difficulty from Intermediate to Expert during moderation. I agree with her decision, mostly because the sections are long. Probably comparable to the original Comfort Zone. Not all of them -- many are totally fair -- but occasionally it feels like a section (or sometimes an entire level) goes past "fun" and into "repetitious" because you have to do the same things so many times just to make progress. You sometimes get the feeling that iamtheratio threw every idea he had into any given section, when a more concise approach might've been more fun in the end. Long sections aren't necessarily a bad thing by themselves, but occasionally they go too far here.
I also didn't appreciate the huge difficulty spike in the penultimate level, which was a very hard (for me) shell level. If you're not a Shell Person, this one's going to take some work. That level took me about an hour and a half, in a hack where I would normally clear 4-6 exits in an hour. There's nothing wrong with putting a shell level in your hack, but if you're not making a shell hack then I think you should scale down the difficulty to be more generally approachable. Shells are something that not everyone likes (and some people actively dislike them), so suddenly upping the difficulty with expert-level shell tricks was a little abrasive. This one just felt a bit over-tuned.
The other stuff I didn't like really boils down to my own preferences, mostly chocolate stuff here and there. There was a level where you can't jump and that's the opposite of fun for me. Jumping is Mario's main verb, don't take away the best thing about Mario. It's wrong. There's another level in the hack (I won't spoil the concept) that I think a lot of people will probably love, but I didn't like because it's not really what I play Mario for. Plus there's an annoying boss fight at the end of it. I didn't care much for the final boss either, but I am not a fan of bosses in general. However, it was a unique fight and I can appreciate the craft that went into it. There's nothing wrong with it (though the final phase felt a bit spammy), I'm just never going to be excited about that sort of thing. Also, there are a lot of trolls, which after a long section can feel a bit unkind.
But overall, the good far outweighs the bad, and it's definitely one of the more notable releases from 2023 so far. It's full of cool ideas and fun setups, and frequently makes it a point to be original. Don't let the difficulty rating scare you off either. Most of the hack is pretty squarely in the upper intermediate range, but when it ramps up like the shell level, I think it earns the expert rating. It almost makes me wonder if Invictus should be re-rated as expert. So yeah, play this hack. I don't know if iamtheratio plans to make more hacks, but if he does and he learns the same lessons that Orka learned from making Comfort Zone, he could have a really bright future as a creator. As a debut, it's impressive as hell.
In other kaizo news, Bunbun 3 is finally out! That's almost certainly going to be my next hack. I've also been thinking about giving Kaizo Kindergarten another look. After 150 hacks I think I might finally be ready for it.
