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Exactly as advertised, this is an under an hour game with a pretty basic story and premise. While running through a palette-swapped version of Booster's Tower, you fight some modified enemies with just Mario. There are some unique animations and attacks for Mario and the enemies, though most of the former are just palette-swapped versions of existing one. Speaking of the palette, it's very bland (gray-scale), and while that is clearly intentional, it is a bit dull to look at for the entire experience.

In terms of difficulty and strategy, there really isn't much here. Beat up some enemies for enough cash, buy the best equipment, and breeze on through. There are some tricks to the boss battles, but these are kept pretty tame. Ultimately, when limited to only a single character, it really keeps things pretty straightforward without much room for strategy.

Still, the environment, gameplay, and story were perfectly fine for what this hack is (a short single area RPG). It has a unique style to it and showcases some familiar things in a new light.

I was skeptical to try given the reference of the previous review, but i I find my impressions dramatically different, so I fell morally obligated to recognize this author's work on SMRPG hacking, which still remains a far-from-trivial work to do with the current tools.

This is basically a dark-themed small story of Mario lost in a mansion that resembles Booster's Tower. Overall palettes, including enemies and their spells and attacks have been adapted to reflect this spiritual-dark theme. Compared to other SMRPG hacks where the authors tried to go pretty aggressive or almost POP-party with the palettes, I find that, despite the unusual theme, this author tried to remain consistent and managed to get this right most of the time, using animations and custom spells in an intelligent fashion. I even found one small section near the end slightly creepy, which I appreciated.

Battles will remain relatively easy (and a bit repetitive) once you go through the mansion to conclude with a fair challenge at the end if you keep your equipment smart, updated and have a moderate stash of items. I didn't find myself making complex strategies to finish and didn't die once. (Well, technically... You find out)

Some minor graphical glitches. I never got stuck.

You should take less than 30-45 min to finish.

• POTENTIAL SPOILER/in-depth discussion -

There's also a bit of puzzling and some complex scripting near the end, which was very pleasant to go through and this is probably the part that gives out the most out of the artistic inspiration and unique contribution of this work, whether in dialog, technicalities and subtle details in events, names and characterizations.

This work reinstates and promotes the figure of Geno (or any other of his kind) as a higher and unintelligible entity in this spiritual-dark context, and I find the way the author did it was very appropriate as this is the only hack I've found so far to even scratch the subject. The way to integrate all of this onto the climax of the last battle will give you a nice feeling. The ending script was also cute and humorous :)

From looking a the pictures one might think this game is fun, and it was for a few minutes. But, I couldn't help getting stuck in curtain parts of the game. The big reason why I don't like it is that it just left a bad feeling in my stomach like it was naturally not fun.