again?
'the (also known as Coronation Day) is a Horror themed Super Mario World ROM Hack released by Medic, Torchkas, and underway in January 2016. The hack features Mario in a forest like environment, with various messages coming from a strange, disembodied voice, but there's something more to it than that...
Download it here
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Examples:
- A God Am I: Ghost Peach proclaims itself this before it chases you.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: After escaping Ghost Peach and going through the cavern, the game reloads the initial forest again, but with you playing as Peach.
- Arc Words: "again?"
- Automatic New Game: There is no logo or title screen. After loading the hack, the game goes straight to the intro screen.
- Big Bad: Ghost Peach, probably; it seems to be responsible for the strange happenings, and is the only enemy character, but the “story” is so vague and surreal that it is hard to tell either way.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Than the orignal Super Mario World, obviously. Also overlaps with Darker and Edgier.
- Cosmic Horror Story: From what can be gathered, Ghost Peach is an Eldritch Abomination that is forcing Mario to repeat the same level again and again, with a gruesome ending waiting for him at each path. And none of the endings have him escaping this hell.
- Dark Reprise: One of the few songs in the game is mostly a haunting repetition of the first few notes from the regular Super Mario World overworld theme.
- Developer's Foresight: If you manage to lockpick the ROM, open it in Lunar Magic and discard the overworld's custom palettes, you'll be greeted with hidden text reading "DON'T YOU KNOW HACKING IS A SIN?"
- Easter Egg: The static heard upon entering a level and viewing the "again?" message is actually a spectrogram, reading "start anew where the light vanishes."
- Every song in the game has a title, scrambled within the game's coding. In alphabetical order, they are called "a rage"*, "beginning"*, "crawl"*, "death"*, "dark"*, "memory"*, "mistake"*, "mystery"*, "recall"*, "world"*, and a final track without a proper name*.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- Whatever the hell Ghost Peach is, it’s not normal. It looks like Peach but is demonic-looking, calls itself the god of the forest, and seems to be a Reality Warper that keeps Mario trapped in the forest.
- Whatever is described in the Burning Forest is likely to be this. It may be Ghost Peach itself.
Its head towered in the light, horns larger than its head, sounds that weren’t from this time. What a staggering sight. The answer lies on the collection of worlds. It simply goes from front to back. - Gainax Ending: Pretty much all of the "endings" described below count as this, though together they seem to form a vague outline of events.
- Giggling Villain: The glitchy noises that play when Ghost Peach chases you sound vaguely like giggling.
- Guide Dang It!: Getting some of the endings can be obtuse, and the in-game hints are cryptic, not helped by the Mind Screw nature of the game. In particular, one ending requires you to stand in place and do nothing, and another requires hacking the game.
- Jump Scare: After passing the black screen, a loud glitched sound endlessly plays as Ghost Peach suddenly begins chasing you, which can catch the unprepared off guard.
- The Lost Woods: The entire game is set in this.
- Madness Mantra: There's a hidden message on the map screen which can only be seen by disabling layers: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE DID NOT KNOW HE DID NOT KNOW HE DID NOT KNOW"
- Mind Screw: A major part of the horror comes from how little sense everything makes, including the text.
- Multiple Endings: Some of which are hard to get, and none of which make much sense.
- If Mario got caught by Ghost Peach, the game seemingly resets. However, when the player renters the level again, the forest appears to be frozen over, with ghostly images of Mario appearing and disappearing. There are two outcomes that can happen from here:
- If Mario keeps going through the level, eventually, he arrives at the large hill midway through the forest again, except it and the surrounding area is covered with blood. Mario enters a door, which wasn't there previously, and arrives at a treehouse with his corpse shown in the middle of the room. He then leaves and finds himself walking around in an underwater void, before coming across his ghost. At this point, the game resets for real.
- Alternatively, there's a Mario silhouette that you can position Mario in, which causes a message reading "the heart" to appear. At this point, walking back towards the start and pressing Start while on the first bridge causes it to break. This takes you back to what appears to be another reset, but entering the level reveals the forest is on fire this time, while some message boxes say what appear to be lines of poetry. Inputting a button code takes you to a white area with various messages apparently relating to something that happened on July 31st, 1992.
- If Mario successfully evaded Ghost Peach, the player reappears in the forest controlling Peach. At this point, there are two outcomes for the following event:
- If Peach wanders to the end, she eventually comes across a pit, but is forced to walk towards it against her will while a ghostly silhouette watches on and taunts her. After she falls, the game seemingly resets and the player is Mario once again, but this time the forest has a reddish hue. As Mario proceeds forward, the screen blanks out and then reappears with him standing before a pool of blood while a dramatic Scare Chord sounds out. The game becomes softlocked at this point, but if the player holds down the R button, the screen briefly scrolls over to a ghoulish Peach with "I WATCH" written in blood below her.
- If Peach killed all of the Rexes, the disembodied voice suggests that she'd "go back and show THEM". If she does so, however, part of a bridge collapses and plunges her into the water, at which point the game abruptly and seemingly resets. (If she continues forward instead, the previous ending with the pit will play.) However, when the player re-enters the level, Mario is shown falling through a hole and eventually onto a platform in the trees in an underwater-like environment. Mario is tasked by the disembodied voice with removing weeds and gathering wood to build the treehouse/cabin seen in the first ending above, and each time Mario completes one part of the task he is shown falling through the hole again while the disembodied voice shows delight. When the house is complete, Mario is shown falling one more time, but as he falls through the hole in the roof, the screen cuts to black and the game softlocks, forcing the player to reset manually. It's slightly implied that this ending takes place sometime before the game, as the player can come across the cabin with Mario's corpse in it prior to this ending. In addition, the above scene of events happens again in the secret forest ending, only this time there is a second Mario standing in the place you'd land.
- Overlapping with Non-Standard Game Over; after entering the level for the first time, if you don't move or press any buttons, a message pops up every 15 or so seconds. After the third such message, the game freezes and crashes the emulator.
- Another variation on a Non-Standard Game Over: doing nothing when tasked with pulling up weeds in the tree house reveals that there's still a stage timer running in the background, and if it runs out you die as you would in a real, regular Mario game. You're then taken back to the map screen, where your map icon Mario has a halo above him.
- There is one more ending to find should the player decide to hack the game to find the secret forest. It can be found here. (Fair warning, the Pink Forest takes the hack's blood and gore factor much further then the rest of the game.)
- If Mario got caught by Ghost Peach, the game seemingly resets. However, when the player renters the level again, the forest appears to be frozen over, with ghostly images of Mario appearing and disappearing. There are two outcomes that can happen from here:
- Minus World: The cave is an incomprehensible mess of glitchy and mangled sprites.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Part of the game's scariness is that half of the time, it's just you and the background noise. In addition, there is little-to-no context for the weird happenings, making them that much more frightening.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: The scenery is heavily glitched when Ghost Peach begins chasing you. If you get away, the graphics in the cave afterwards is almost entirely garbled.
- Palette Swap: The Forest has various incarnations that usually boil down to different colors and sometimes entities. The most radically changed variations are the Burning Forest and Pink Forest.
- Random Event: The dialogue contained within each text box has several different variations that can appear randomly through each loop. Note that this doesn't apply to "story significant" dialogue.
- Run, Don't Walk: Inverted; the run function is straight-up disabled, although button presses are still recognized. This is important for the Burning Forest ending.
- Surreal Horror: There is very little explanation for anything, the text boxes are vague and cryptic, the game acts in weird ways, and the possible Big Bad is an Eldritch Abomination scary ghost version of Princess Peach.
- Word-Salad Horror: The text boxes can be seen as this if one doesn't try to connect any of the scattered pieces- they are very cryptic and do not make immediate sense.
