NEON THOUGHTS - SIN

I had been keeping tabs on this project for a few months and I was pleasantly surprised to see it show up here. I assumed, like most interesting things in this community, it would be one of those projects that gets teased but never shows up. Color me impressed. These are my thoughts on the demo.

THE GOOD:
This hack has one of the most thought out presentations of any ROM hack I've seen in years. It's clearly been worked on for a long time (I remember that teaser from 3-4 years ago…) and the degree of polish seen is unrivaled this year. It’s cool! The soundtrack is especially good. It’s honestly my favorite thing about the hack. The MGHZ track is spectacular.  Kudos to you for using the CD’s sampler chip. One minor note is that despite using 6 FM channels, the GHZ1 track only feels like it’s using 3 channels. It could use a re-arrange.

GHZ2 has one of the best-designed Green Hill acts in all of ROM hacking. I think it’s up there with 4.0 Sunny Shores’ layouts. Especially after the firebombing. It’s refreshing to have in-depth layouts like that.

The mid-level Cutscenes are very cool. To my recollection, I think only Hellfire Saga has done that in a Sonic hack. It’s nice to see a tangible story being told through a hack, In my experience most hacks completely lack a narrative and are just “Oh look here’s 6 levels. La dee da.” It’s so abundantly clear that you care about this project to a deep extent and the love and attention to detail you’ve put in is commendable.

THE BAD:
The gameplay design can be so bullshit hard. It’s oftentimes not fun at all. I started my first play-through, had 300 or so rings, and went into the first boss. I then proceeded to die once the second phase started, and was placed right before said boss with no rings. Granted, that is a mechanic in the vanilla games, and you do acknowledge that the “difficulty curve is meant to be sharper than the average Sonic game” but it took me about 20 more minutes to get through that boss sequence.

GHZ2’s boss, on the other hand, was surprisingly easy by comparison. I beat it in about 30 seconds, despite it supposed to be harder with the “hit the helmet 3 times” gimmick and the litany of rockets thrown my way.

Neon Carnival, unfortunately, is just boring. It really just comes down to it being diet Carnival Night with chunk art from somewhere else. And it’s so lethargically long. It took me 7 minutes and 41 seconds to get to the Knuckles boss in Act1. I went over 10min during the Metal Sonic race in Act 2. Thank god there are no time overs! These levels feel like they’re the size of 3 acts during just 1 act! It’s kind of crazy to me.

The Makeshift boss is neat but the fact that rings are scarce around the area means that I’m having to conserve 3 rings throughout the whole fight. I game over’d about twice during it.  I think with Makeshift's design you should really lean into the T-1000 angle you're almost at right now. Have you ever watched Terminator 2? that shit's scary! The hack's tagline is “Neon Dreams, Neon Nightmares.” And yet I'm not scared, unnerved, or even slightly perturbed. Look at H.R. Giger's artworks if you want inspiration for some truly unnerving bio-mechanical designs.

The difficulty being so stop start, swinging back-and-forth between trivially easy and painfully difficult leads me to believe that this needed QA testing outside of the circle of developers. If you had a ring system like Sonic Boom’s - where rings are lost in 20-ring increments - then this would be a far less frustrating experience.

This project desperately needs originality. I groaned when I heard the Crackers music and art during Neon Carnival. I think, while Green Hill can be excused, the fact that the preview zones in this demo and in the trailers are all using reused assets from other sonic games is very disheartening. So much of this hack feels like a reference to something else rather than something with a truly unique coherent identity. You're using the CD bumper and sound effect in a zone that has Crackers and S3 art. Your shadowy-edge-lord OC just uses Knuckles’ CNZ behavior in his cutscene. I can tell where all of the individual parts of this hack were originally taken from. It feels like a crossover flash cartoon rather than one unique product.

OVERALL:
I can tell that this is obviously a passion project and I commend the effort you have put into making this hack. This is the most impressive hack this year, even though it is difficult actually playing it. The potential is there. It’s up to you to take advantage of it.