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Super Mario: Call of Cthulhu. RTTP

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Happy Halloween! I hope your bellies are filled with delicious candy! (your family members' too)

to celebrate the occasion, i wanted to make a thread on a spooky Mario World ROMhack. I've had this idea since the beginning of October, and while the month isn't the best as Mario Wonder has already released and people have had their 2D Mario fill from that, I still think this game is worthy of your time if you're into Mario and horror.

There's this old Mario World Romhack from 2012 called Super Mario: Call of Cthulhu. It's a hack i have known and beloved for quite some time, now. It's a horror take on Mario that adapts Cthulhu to the original SNES Mario World. Now I'm gonna be blunt here, I know nothing about Cthulhu... I'm not that well read on literature. However, if I ever get around to reading it one day, this hack will be one of the reasons why.

The game's visually really interesting and well made. A lot of the game's spritework consists of edited Mario World sprites but the majority is original work. The tilesets have been modified to look more detailed and disturbing, the enemies are twisted and mangled from their original sprites (tastefully though, without going overboard like a terrible creepypasta), the game in general feels the polar opposite of how charming and safe the original Mario World felt.


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This is aided by the music choices which aren't songs from the original, but compositions from other games that are put into this hack to serve the atmosphere, and it works really well. The song played in the second area really gives me nostalgic but chilling vibes!

To me, though one of, if not the best parts about the hack is the level design. Whereas Mario World went for a challenging but open world where every level has more than 1 exit, this hack focuses on more puzzle style, linear gameplay. Levels (after the first) will focus on a central gimmick, and really push it to its extreme. I'm not gonna spoil them, because I feel like you should see them for yourself, going in blind is the best way to experience gameplay like this IMO.

You can easily find the patched rom on a site like Archive.org, put it in an emulator & you're good to go. I hope you get to play it. Have a nice Halloween!
 
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