Got another couple of hacks in recently.
As I mentioned about a month ago, I finally checked out the latest Nightmare Cafe (Nightmare Cafe Seasons, for those keeping track). This one might be the hardest one yet. Lush has come a long way as a player and a designer since the first NC came out and I appreciate how much of that growth is visible over the course of the series. I kinda want to go back and play the very first one again just to see the difference. With this latest one I feel like he's leaned into the fact that you can make a single room challenge a little tougher than you might make an obstacle in a larger level. I cleared the whole thing in a bit more than an hour, some of the rooms definitely took me a good bit longer than expected. Fun hack, but don't go into it expecting to breeze through. You'll have to work for the credits in this one.
After that, I played through 2022's instant classic Fail World. I remember being intrigued but afraid of this one when it came out. About a month ago I happened to see fryinb playing it on stream for its second anniversary and it looked super fun, so my interest was piqued once again. By this point I knew there's nothing in the hack I couldn't handle, so I patched it up and finally got into it last week. Having beaten it today, I really enjoyed about 90% of this hack. Not all of it was for me and that's okay, because the entire hack was literally made for one person, so if other people like it that's just a bonus. Overall it's a hack full of brainy and intricate platforming, which is usually going to be right up my alley. The levels I didn't care for tended to be (in my opinion) either overly tight or overly complicated -- feeling in some way just a little overtuned compared to the rest of the hack. The vast majority of sections felt very fair in length, though, so I never felt like I had to spent a ton of time doing something that wasn't fun. I used drkrdnk's Youtube playthrough as a guide for the levels I wasn't smart or stubborn enough to figure out on my own, and the whole playthrough ended up going much more quickly than I'd expected. I didn't really time anything, but most levels were done in under 30 minutes and I feel like I only had maybe five or six play sessions in all. For a 27 exit expert hack, it went by super quickly. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who's up to the challenge, there's an absurd amount of good stuff to be found here. For people who don't necessarily want to play every level, this is one where I could imagine downloading a cleared save from SMW Central and just playing the ones that look neat. I also want to give a special shoutout to BabaYegha for the overworld, which may very well be the best overworld I've ever seen. There's so much detail and animation crammed into every inch of the map. It's really an accomplishment in its own right.
And now I don't know what to play next! It seems like we're in another slow period for hack releases and there isn't much on the horizon that I'm aware of. I'm sure someone will surprise me soon enough, but for now it's kind of a weird in-between time.
