Sonic is alone. – A Halloween 2024 ROM Hack

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CW: themes of isolation, mild flashing lights, and visuals that may trigger trypophobia.

Created in just 12 days for Halloween 2024, this short ROM hack is all about how much of an eerie atmosphere can be achieved in Sonic 1 by removal alone.

Every action carries an immediate, permanent consequence. Collecting a ring, defeating an enemy, finishing a level—each choice causes something in the game to vanish forever. The more Sonic interacts with his surroundings, the emptier the world becomes, leaving him to wander through a silent, desolate landscape. There are no jumpscares, no hyper-realistic blood, and definitely no Sonic.exe—just a quiet, decaying world. Will you keep moving forward, even as everything around you fades into meaninglessness? Or will you look for an escape?

Thanks to: ajcox, Chaotic SoFa, vladikcomper, zakku, DeltaW

P.S.: Inspired by Spindαsh in Sonic 2 SMS and Half-Life 2: Alone Mod. Also, I would've loved to call this hack Sonic Eraser, but unfortunately that name is already taken. At least it served as a nice palette cleanser after working on Sonic ERaZor 7 for ten months, heh.

 

Sonic is alone. A development backstory.

The idea for this hack came to me when I saw Half-Life 2: Alone Mod twelve days before Halloween. I already had a huge soft spot for Spindash in Sonic 2 SMS from this year's SHC, so that's when I decided to do something similar for the holiday, as I felt like that was a good amount of days to get something done that has substance, without ending up in development hell.

I didn't work all 12 days though, it was more like two batches of 4 days, with a break of 4 days in between because I was severely roadblocked. See, the first chunk of workdays was all about getting as many ideas into the hack as possible; the second one was then all about assembling the mess I made into anything coherent. Admittedly, the first half was fun, as it was basically just about going through the source code and deleting objects one by one. The only problem I hadn't thought of until that point... Half-Life 2 is a much more atmospheric game by nature, so just removing everything has a bigger impact than doing the same thing in a Sonic game.

Basically, in my efforts to make an empty Sonic game, I made the game TOO empty.

So that's when four days of roadblock hit me, completely unable to think of a way to make sense of all these ideas. It took me a lot of brainstorming to get out of that rut. The dark filters were the first thing getting addressed to spice things up. Initially, the whole thing only kicked in almost immediately, which is where the idea of instantly ending the level when you erase something came to be. Then doing some playtests to find an order of levels that more or less guaranteed a solid pace until about Labyrinth Zone, where the game is supposed to really slow down and make you feel about the oppression getting worse and worse. But I still wasn't satisfied. One cut idea was somehow tying the Seven Deadly Sins to the hack (you know, greed is rings, wrath is destroying a badnik, sloth is collecting a checkpoint, and so on), but it was way too ambitious in the short time I had to not end up painfully missing the mark and sounding pretentious.

In the end, what really helped me finishing this hack was a spark of genius by my playtester Chaotic SoFa, who gave me a narrative explanation for why everything is the way it is in the hack. I will not say what it is, other than your imagination is probably cooler than what the actual reality is. It doesn't quite matter anyway, it helped me wrap this project up with confidence, finally with a clear vision in mind.

When everything was done and playable, a bit of time was left, so I actually had the opportunity to give this game an ending. It's a bit on the nose, but the goggles monitor being the key to escape is meant to be all about "do you see now?" and I don't think anyone caught that (and btw, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, explore SBZ3 further). The last thing was to mess around with the special stages and somehow add credits. It's beautiful getting away with crudely overlaying the credits font onto the special stages, you got no idea. Oh yeah, and no, there isn't any other ending from there. Sonic is now permanently stuck in special stage purgatory, congratulations. Even glitching out of bounds and collecting an emerald is meaningless when the world outside the special stages no longer exists. I actually considered adding this to the SRAM, but that would've locked players out of exploring the cut levels in the level select. Not that there was much to see there in the first place, but still.

All in all, I'm really satisfied how the hack turned out, even if it required crunching for hours a day before Halloween to get the damn thing done.

Happy Halloween 2024!

 

Yes.

Spoiler

There is a cryptic way to break the curse, hidden in SBZ3. Admittedly, should've made that a bit more apparent, that's on me.

But overall, the main focus is on the solitude. Personally (and I could sound pretentious as all hell here) the hack doesn't fully make sense until you completed a couple of loops. I really wanted to encapsulate the feeling of isolation and the existentialism of it all. You know, can't die in a dead world. So it's more a game about what you feel, rather than what you do. That also extends to your interpretation of it all.

Also any softlocks you encounter are the result of the short time I had for this hack. It's why you can return to the title screen at any time using Pause+A (which is narratively also meant to tie into the game, because even with all cheats enabled, Sonic is still alone.)