Sonic the Hedgehog Phantom Remix

Link: https://shc.zone/entries/contest2024/1079

This hack is a little hit or miss for me. I think it has some very nice ideas but just as many problems, and as a result I wasn’t the biggest fat of it overall.

The visuals

The palettes on display there are generally nice, but I feel like it fails where it starts to rely on way too much purple. Why is Sonic purple on the title screen? Labyrinth is also way too aggressively purple.

The other palettes are more aesthetically pleasing, but not without flaws either; as sometimes the color ramps aren’t preserved.

Bridge has a very nice overall mood, but some color ramps are outright broken. Take a look at BZ clouds. Where there should be a lighter color, a darker shade is used, completely breaking the art.

In Jungle, the palette also breaks falling logs:

The new art is also a little hit or miss. In GHZ, stars look more like rhombuses. Some size variety and less “square” placement would’ve gone a long way. I also really like the idea of adding trees to Bridge, but they look quite flat. I don’t have any complaints about any other added art, though.

World map 2 also has some really nice fancy stars.

I also don’t think the “glass” look to the Special Stages works.

The level design

There are some really clever ideas here. In GHZ, there’s some really good usage of waterfalls and fake walls and a chaos emerald spot that’s a genuine headscratcher. Bridge and Jungle also have really nice hiding spots, although in Jungle I don’t like how you can’t retry the platforming challenge.

What’s to be commended is how this hack turns very simple levels into something expansive and fun to explore. This is especially apparent in Bridge, Jungle and Scrap Brain 1, although in Bridge in particular the individual paths get a bit bland. Scrap Brain 2 goes a little overboard on this, and it’s sometimes very hard to tell if you’re going forwards or backwards. It does have these really cool elevators, though.

I quite like how in Jungle Zone 2, the act is less about the rising floor per se and more about riding on logs above water. There is, however, one spot (with three platforms near a ring monitor) where you’d expect solid collision, but it’s not there, and you fall through easily.

The biggest problem with the levels is the spike placement in Green Hill and Labyrinth. In the latter, the combination of spike placement and the water physics makes them particularly hard to avoid and make the overall level quite miserable.

In Bridge 2, it’s also very difficult to judge which pits are safe to go down and which aren’t and there’s some very questionable chopper placement.

Conclusion

Overall, I think that this hack has some very nice ideas and really good entire levels, but there’s a lot of work to be done to make it enjoyable from start to finish.