Memento Mori

Where do I even start with this one…

Silencio was a success and people liked it more than I ever thought they would. However, most players ended up only recommending any% to others, disregarding a few of the best levels in the hack just because "The Black Lodge" left a sour taste in their mouths.

As I mentioned in the Silencio recollection, I do not regret that level. But my goal with Memento Mori was to create a hack that could be enjoyed by everyone all the way through. I also felt like Silencio didn't quite reach the level of obstacle creativity of some of my later Mario Maker 2 Levels, simply because I just needed to get used to the transition and had to learn lunar magic while making it.

I also figured since Silencio was pretty much a Twin Peaks hack, the next one should be themed around one of my other favorite tv-shows. The X-Files. I jumped into the creation of it right after Silencio 1.1 got done without any kind of break I would remember now.

Since I was more comfortable with smw and lunar magic, this one took about a month less to make than Silencio. I did start from scratch again without the use of a baserom and kind of rushed it out a bit too soon. Mainly because I was excited about it and wanted to watch people play it. There was a very quick 1.1 made after a handful of playthroughs and overall the reception was incredible. Even more people loved it than Silencio and I was so happy. I felt like I did manage to come up with more creative setups, it had a nice variety of ideas/gimmicks and the 2 separate paths you could take meant lb's could skip the water level and still see credits. Some of my fondest memories are jquery861, TheMFFlash and Light speedrunning the hack at the same time.

Problem was I later ended up hating this fucking hack.

Silencio had a somewhat unique, moody atmosphere throughout but I tried way too hard to make people happy with Memento to the point where I included aesthetics and music choices that I would never even consider today. Truly gross stuff. Even though overall the hack was more creative this time, too many setups revealed themselves to be annoying and rough, or too simple and first-drafty. Which was probably a symptom of me rushing the creation of the hack a bit.

For a long time, I thought I would just have to live with it. Until one day years later, I used my 2 week vacation to completely remake it from the ground up using the flux baserom (more on that on another day). I fixed a lot of the setups, removed various p-switches, redesigned sections, updated the aesthetics and chose some new music.

I am very happy with how this remake turned out and I now think of Memento Mori the same way most other people always did. As one of my most fun, accessible and polished creations. I like that people can still play the original version if they want to for whatever reason, but I hope I never have to see it ever again.