Suddenly three months have passed and I've been playing SMW again lately. I miss talking about this stuff!
I was thinking about 2025 as a whole for the kaizo community. The pace of releases has definitely slowed down considerably, but I think a lot of meaningful stuff still happened last year. In general it kinda feels like 2025 was the Year of the Forever Hack, by which I mean a couple of different things. For me the first real volley was Yoshi's Revenge, which was truly excellent and probably my favorite hack of the year. At the hack's baseline, there are 46 very carefully crafted exits. If the hack had stopped there, it would still be my hack of the year because I had a blast playing it, but there's practically an entire second hack's worth of optional post-credits content for the folks who want even more. (I decided I was done after clearing the regular game.)
In another sense, 2025 also saw a bunch of insanely difficult Grandmaster* hacks that all sought to raise the upper limits of player skill. Obviously there was Dram 3 which took even the best of players dozens of hours to clear, but we also saw things like Really Neat Gimmicks from the legendary Jeffw. In a similar but parallel track, the Expansion of the Combat Zone and Jigoku 3 pushed players with combinations of input density and precision unlike anything that's come before them. I don't think anyone has even beat Combat Zone without checkpoints yet.
Outside of these absurdly grindy hacks, I've noticed that difficulty in general seems to be creeping up all around. There've been a few recent Expert hacks that I was shocked weren't bumped up to Master during moderation, whether from the difficulty of the hacks themselves or due to the expectations they make of the player. Though I guess "Expert" is effectively supposed to be what we used to consider "upper intermediate", and that was always an extremely wide umbrella, so maybe it's just me. I do worry a little bit that with there being fewer new hacks combined with the overall increase in difficulty, we might be entering a period where the genre becomes a bit more insular and less accessible to people who don't already play. Obviously there are still plenty of great older hacks for new players to jump into, but the path forward for them feels murkier than it did when we were all in our first year or so of playing. Maybe I'm just projecting unrelated anxiety onto this, I dunno.
Leaving difficulty concerns aside, the past couple of months have seen some really strong releases which were all fun and welcome. The very end of December brought another new drkrdnk banger, Obstinate, which is full of fun little interactions that I haven't seen in other hacks. Needless to say, it also looks fantastic. Then in the beginning of January we had an excellent debut hack called World of Jumps from a creator named Maltz. They've clearly played a lot of hacks and also put a ton of time into their own. Levels are well thought-out, creative, and generally a lot of fun, though there are some "first hack" pitfalls that pop up -- the early levels of the hack have some sections that are really long, and there are a handful of really big difficulty spikes, but it mostly smooths out after that. I really liked this one and would recommend it to any fan of running and/or jumping.
Some other recent highlights: Acid Tapes Vol. 2 from twicepipes, one for the vanilla sickos. I'm always impressed by people who can mine fresh design ideas from vanilla SMW, and twicepipes is one of the best. It's definitely not a hack for everyone, though. There are multiple knowledge checks in most levels, and even if you know what to do, pulling it off can be extremely demanding. This is one of those Expert hacks I was shocked not to see listed as Master difficulty instead. I'm really glad to have played it, but it's not the kind of hack I want to play every day. On the other side of the coin, we recently got a surprise new hack from VLSkoot called Doomscroll. It's just as clever as you'd expect from VL, and an extremely chill playthrough. It's got 19 exits but I finished the whole thing in about 90 minutes. Another easy recommendation. And finally, last week we had the first hack I'm aware of from kaizo's Irish contingent, The Precise is Right from pixlrik. This is a Nightmare Cafe-style hack based on (you might've guessed) precision rooms. I had fun with this one, but YMMV depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing. If nothing else, boot up the title screen for a port of the Price is Right theme song that goes way harder than it ought to.
In between those hacks, I played two more exits in Dram 2 and decided that hack wasn't for me. But I have kept up with Grand Poo World (the first), albeit very slowly. I picked up my playthrough again back in...September, I think? And today I beat the infamous skytree Fangorn, which I was not looking forward to. It was very tough, but because the game doesn't save checkpoints I had to do it in one sitting, so I wanted to make sure I had like 3 consecutive hours free to get it done. Most levels haven't taken that long by any means, but for the ones I know are going to be rough I need to set that time aside. I just don't have the flexibility on random weeknights anymore.
And in between that, I recently started practicing key jumps again because I have brain problems. I can't remember if my previous PB was 7 or 8, but it's definitely 8 now. I hit that two days in a row, so I feel like my original goal of 10 is within reach.
Geez, this post got long. I guess I really did miss talking about kaizo.
*Huh, we never talked about how SMW Central changed its difficulty ratings, did we?
