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Highly recommended for anyone who has mastered the original and looking for a spiritual sequel to savour.

With perhaps the longest levels I've ever played in an SMB2 Hack, plus a mere three lives to start you on your first attempts, "Black Sheep Dream" is deceptively difficult.

One of AetherKnight's main design objectives for this hack was to better "accomodate" the 'B' run, and they accomplished this well. This hack is not a sprint, it's a marathon; you won't get very far merely trying to dash though all the obstacles, like you can do in the original. It forces you to play more strategically, and I enjoyed that very much.

You may think of stars,hearts, coins and mushrooms as neat accessories to playthroughs of the original. But here, they are nigh mandatory collectibles if you want to progress. You'll want to farm as many coins as you can find in each level early on, so you can even hope to leave World 1! Two hits per life demands next to no mistakes in levels as long as these, so you'll want three or four to improve your chances. And whilst cherries made neat little wall ornaments in most levels of the original, here you might find yourself strategically grabbing the fifth of five to obtain a star before a tricky birdo fight at the end of a long gauntlet of enemies.

Challenging Birdo fights aside, other bosses have boosted hitpoints, hidden within brand-new challenging castles and dungeons. For example, Fryguy takes about eight hits in this game, and its castle in level 4-3 has some of the trickiest rooms in the game to conquer beforehand.

As far as hacks go, this one perhaps best recreates the feeling of playing the original game for the first time: the difficulty is brutal for the unprepared, the levels are classically themed, and crucially, there are multiple paths you can take to 7-2. The game, like the original, encourages exploration, and that exploration will often reward the player with hidden 1-ups, large coin caches, and some of the most creatively hidden warp zones I've seen. It really capture's the original's spirit in this sense, whilst also creatively playing with vanilla interactions in ways that may stretch the player's understanding beyond what they're used to.

Some may well be deterred by how long and frustrating certain levels can be, even as the best characters for a blind playthrough like this, such as Luigi or Peach. This game will demand patience from you at times, and in no other place will that be demanded more than in the maze levels in World 2 and World 6, where some areas you discover will be near duplicates of another, requiring thorough exploration every time you enter somewhere that seems familiar. The aforementioned boosted hit points may be a bit too high to be considered a fair challenge at the end of their respective worlds.

Nevertheless, the level design in Black Sheep Dream is incredible, and is one to try if you no longer find yourself challenged by the original, but are seeking a new kind of longterm SMB2 challenge.