Amazing concept, but i sadly have a number of qualms with how inconsistent the polish can be. Yes i know thats the point but in my opinion, constantly seeing fake paintings having their textures almost always slightly misaligned or doors being misaligned (like the one on the side of the castle near the waterfall… geez), it kind of takes me out of what this game is trying to do if that makes any sense. Still, a lot of the areas are really interesting and fun to explore, and plus its mario 64 so just moving around is fun on its own. And I know for a lot of people b3313 will definitely satisfy that itch of exploring cool mario 64 liminal spaces.

Its just that for me it only reaches maybe like 80% of what I truly want out of something like this. The castle areas are easily the most fun to explore but they range so wildly in quality for me. I still think theres more room for potential here… I want to explore fleshed out areas like the parallel lobby or nebula lobby instead of the 4b floor…. which that floor really isnt great in my opinion!

It’s weird though. I think you’d be better off not 100%ing the game, dont even go for it in the slightest. Surprisingly going for every single fucking star, at least for me, provided a lot more annoyances with how the structure of this game is than I wanted, which is to be expected.

Overall its a really interesting and honestly really cool game. I think it has a great balance of that intentional inconsistency in its structure but also still having some sense of direction, meaning you can actually map out a specific place you wanna go to which is really cool. But sadly the experience slowly got worse for me as I went for 100%… so dont go for 100%.

Play Unabandoned.

A flawed masterpiece, riddled with less than subtle jabs at the drama surrounding it. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"

I had a 1-2k word review for this, but it is unfinished; therefore, this review will be Bojangles4th's B3313 Review 0.9 Abandoned.

Can already hear the clamors of "just separate the art from the artist!!" but that sign section reeked to me. I shrugged it off in ignorance and a desire to continue this experience blind. I did not follow the iceberg stuff, I did not read SM64 creepypastas (though I knew about the majority of the urban legends predating the mass-writing exercise fabrication process in 2020), and the BOO

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Unfortunate, as exploring this game is utterly magical to me but I can't in good faith ever recommend [REDACTED]

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I forgot what I was going to say. Might as well mark the review as finished (abandoned). This is you (the reader's) fault.


This is Bojangles4th's B3313 1.0 (Official) review, version 0.9 (Abandoned)

GET ME OUT!!
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Romhacking page for B3313 Unabandoned: https://romhacking.com/hack/b3313-unabandoned
BL page for it: https://www.backloggd.com/games/b3313-unabandoned/

[Played through the Unabandoned A2 version.]

Remember the Super Mario 64 iceberg?

As someone who grew up on the game and its DS port, mid-2020 was a very fun time period for me. The renewed interest in the game and its development, with the gigaleak serving as its climax, was genuinely very entertaining to watch unfold; Luigi’s model being uncovered 24 years and 01 months after the game’s Japanese release was my “you had to be there” moment.

Anyways, all that resulted in a lot of mythology spawning around the game and its heavily storied development. A lot of it shares blood with creepypastas and general modern internet rumors - the kinda stuff you’d hear on the playground, but lamer and less believable. Nearly four years later, B3313 embraces all that mythology and interest in Super Mario 64 and turns it into a weird, dense Yume Nikki-esque soup.

This romhack is impossible to review comprehensively. It pulls from the preview builds, the gigaleak’s assets, the iceberg, and a lot of internet mythos, as I previously mentioned. As such, my review will consist mostly of broad strokes.

Starting with some of the negatives, the game’s controls are deliberately worse than SM64. Mario is really slippery (especially when skidding, he goes on for way too long), and at first, you don’t have the backflip, long jump, and breakdance kick. The triple jump gets the slow fall twirl thing you get from stomping on Fly Guys and Spindrifts in exchange for a bit of height. That’s good for distance, but Mario cannot grab ledges while slow falling. Adapting to this was a nightmare.

I understand the decision to alter the controls like this - the controls are pulled from the Space World demo of the game. They were retooled for the final release precisely because of how loose they felt. Level design isn’t kind all the time either, with a lot of jumps you barely have the height for. Normally, I wouldn’t complain about difficult level design, but the slipperier controls and very precise jumps makes it worth noting and a source of annoyance. I understand and respect why the decision to make the controls like this was made, but I miss the precision the final game had.

The camera can be particularly atrocious. B3313’s original courses feature level design that’s far more claustrophobic than SM64’s - a lot of this is intentional because of the atmosphere it shoots for, but a lot of the time that sort of level design combined with the awful camera getting stuck results in platforming that’s not unnerving or “living a dream”-y, but rather just annoying. A lot of the time, when twirling and slow falling after a triple jump, the camera likes to point up, which is the one angle that’s not useful when jumping, and that led to my death more than once. Yes, I agree SM64’s camera can be particularly insufferable, but I ran into this way more frequently in B3313 and I feel I touched maybe what, 10% of the total areas?

Moving on, B3313’s scope is the main selling point and it delivers. It’s absurdly cryptic and expansive, with so many layers of places to go that if you fuck up and die it can take a long time to get back to where you were. This is what I meant by the game being impossible to review comprehensively - so many areas with so many warps that it’s impossible to keep a map of them in your head. Granted, the hack indirectly recommends against this, with Yoshi saying to “just let it happen, like a dream.”

The game leans hard into the “every copy is personalized” meme, and the amount of sheer variety in stuff does help with the feeling it’s pulling from your mind. There are a lot of different versions of the 15 courses found in the final game, ranging from small differences in geometry and color palette to entirely new weather and features added. There are also a lot of variants of the castle and its interior halls (with the hud even changing depending on what “era” of the game you find), with access to each being granted differently, as well as a many, many all-new courses. It’s all highly labyrinthian, and fucking up and dying can toss you many, many minutes back. The game even uses your system time to activate a few effects, which is pretty impressive to me!

The most fascinating part about it to me, though, is how… dreamlike it all feels. Areas vary wildly in size, with some being tight mazes and others being enormous. Combined with the constant fog, endless-feeling amount of doors and paths, and the always at least slightly-off-kilter music contributes heavily to that feeling that you’re playing a dream of the game… but with beta elements mixed in.

Where the game loses me a bit is in its horror elements. I get why they were included - analog horror and conspiracies were prominent elements of the mythos that formed around the game in mid-2020. And, to its credit, the game seems to pull near-entirely from those sources; from my research, a lot of it originates from Greenio’s “Super Mario 64: CLASSIFIED” series (even including the AI core asking to be destroyed), with some references to older creepypastas and hacks like sm64.z64, BUP 64, and Faceless.

I’m just not too confident in how the game handles its horror aspects. There’s a lot of warning when you get to the areas with horror elements (sometimes to the point of there being “no entry” signs, unusually dark color palettes, and text boxes telling you to piss off), so they’re easily avoided, but at the same time, pulling off scares in SM64 is kinda really difficult aside from jumpscares? Mario can just schmoove and parkour around, and it kinda takes the edge away when the evil entity that’s chasing you struggles to keep up with long jumps and dive recovers.

I’m also not too big on most of the big scares causing crashes as well. There are only a few “true” jumpscares (one of which I had the misfortune of running into about an hour into my playthrough; if you see faceless Toads, turn back) but being forced a trillion layers back is already punishing enough for not being cautious enough and letting curiosity get the best out of you. Forcing a reset just adds a few more seconds to that.

Anyways, there’s actually a way to progress in this and “beat” it. Technically 100% is achievable, but going for all 450 stars (!) in this spaghetti mess of a game sounds like torture, so I’ll keep it at technically. Back to it, beating Bowser and other bosses gives the player Red Stars. Collect all 13 of them, and you can take the long ass route to the ending. Collecting Red Stars is also crucial to unlocking Mario’s full moveset which… is weird? I’d rather have all the tools at the start to explore these big ass areas.

Outside of that? No real progression aside from unlocking Green Stars at 120 (I think). This ultimately works in the hack’s favor and helps sell the “endless dream” aesthetic, though - getting lost and exploring is part of the appeal. If I recall correctly (I may be wrong on this), older versions had the final level be accessed by climbing up and up in the castle lobbies, and I feel I prefer that approach; there’s a clear, intuitive path the player can follow to beat Bowser for good, but going up and up also reveals many of the paths the player can explore and lose themselves in. Ultimately though, it’s not like I’m playing this to beat it; once I got the long jump and backflip, I just resumed walking around aimlessly trying to find new stuff.

On a last note, the music is… weird. I said it uses a lot of off-kilter versions of the Super Mario 64 soundtrack, but it goes a step further and includes a few tracks from other Mario games that were released before it. A lot of the remixes are good; out of those, “Eel Graveyard” and “Dry Town” are the absolute highlights for me. On the other hand, there’s a few tracks I found intolerable, particularly one used for a few volcano areas. You can make familiar music sound like a distant memory and what you’d hear in a dream without making it actually headache-inducing - most of the game does that!

Wrapping it up, B3313 is one of a kind. The only other prominent hack I know of that does something like this is “Breaking the Barrier”, but that feels extremely limited in comparison. If you’re looking for a tightly-designed romhack, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. Instead, I’d recommend this for those of you who lived through and witnessed the internet mythology surrounding SM64 in mid-2020; B3313 is not only a love letter to that time period, but also a near-perfect snapshot of it, and the experience is generally enhanced by at least knowing the context which spawned this romhack.

I’m not giving this a star rating, though. I absolutely recommend playing this if you were in that mid-2020 SM64 niche like I was, and it remains a really impressive romhack from a technical standpoint all around (seriously the amount the game was modified and expanded is insane), but I dunno if I give it a high rating because of that, or if I give it a lower rating because of the slippery controls, camera that likes to not cooperate and get stuck, and the sometimes grating music. Yes, I know that stuff’s on purpose, but purposefully unpleasant things are still unpleasant!

Play it for yourself if you think it looks cool is my recommendation. I think it’s worth a shot.

genuinely HOW is this on backlogged
regardless of my confusion this is super impressive and provides so much to play, its a really fun thing for discord streams and stuff. Unrelated to the game itself but sadly the ongoing very publicly brought up drama amongst the development side of both the official and unabandoned version leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth and its probably had some genuine effects on how i feel when playing the game. its still amazing though and better than basically every official mario game