Sonic Hacking Contest 2021 Day 1 A Very Frosty and Fun Experience

This year’s Sonic Hacking Contest has begun and might I say there are quite the number of interesting and fun looking mods and games to play. As it goes on, I plan to talk about one to a few of my favorites each day until the contest is over. For today, a certain Sonic Generations mod happened to capture my eyes.

A new snow themed stage mod by Goalringmod27 is a fully original stage mod with many multiple paths and ways to explore. I’m honestly very impressed by the work they put in here. The stage is quite pretty, the funky music helps with the atmosphere, and the level design itself was cohesive. It was a comfy experience rolled up into one that I couldn’t help but replay multiple times.

Starting with the area this stage is built is, it changes multiple times throughout it giving a nice sense of progression not only in level length, but in the stage itself. You start out in what seems to be the middle of the day from a log cabin to which you traverse by snowboard into a town. From there you make your away across it and then over a lake area. In typical Sonic fashion, you run across the water to then enter a frozen crystalline cave. This is probably the most drastic shift in setting, but it’s really nice to look at in game. I almost wish the section were longer.

The red portion of the cave area however does add more variety in design with the various spikes littering the area. This with the combination of the red coloring does well to hit that it’s a more challenging section and for me, it indeed was on my first few tries. However there is a different path in that section that exists to make your life easier!

Out of the cave and in you go into another town area, but this time the sun is starting to set. Somehow this part in particular made me feel nostalgia for an old memory of mine. With all the setting and time change throughout the stage, it really gives you the feeling that you’ve been playing for a while. The stage is fairly long, but my average time usually turned out to be around the 5 minute mark. Somehow it still felt longer than playing Planet Wisp Act 2 in Sonic Generations.

Now for the level design…It’s definitely one of the more interesting takes on boost gameplay I’ve seen from original stage mods like this. Many usually try to replicate official level signatures to make levels “flow” and that’s not a bad thing. While things like that are present here like starting off with a snow board section and a few quickstep segments, I found it that I very rarely used the boost. Though I never felt as though I were going slow or the level design was hindering me, it still felt snappy and fast paced. The level is fully 3d and makes use of genuine platforming that didn’t feel over reliant on using the homing attack as a means to get where you needed to be. This stage always gave you something to focus on and there wasn’t much of what fans would call “hallway” level design. There wasn’t too much of a reason to hold boost down and blast through everything except for the initial snowboarding segment and I appreciate that. I’m more inclined to explore the various paths around the stage.

Though I won’t say it was perfect level design by any means. I think there were a few glaring issues specifically in the cave sections where the stage expects you to drift, but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough room to work with it properly. For example, there’s an instance where it clearly expects you to drift into a dash panel, but it’s a narrow road with no invisible walls or boarders to keep you from falling off and below is a bottomless pit. Unless you got the godlike gamer skills, you’ll probably find yourself taking said section much slower and carefully. Another instance of drift issues arises in the red potion of the cave. There’s a part where you’re expected to drift/boost through the cleared path in between the abundance of spikes in the water, however once again it’s a very narrow area and you can easily boost into the area with the spikes and get trapped in them. This also causes your boost to stop which means there’s nothing keeping Sonic from instantly drowning in water. Though I can’t complain about this one for too long as there is a different path near the checkpoint of that section that allows you to skip it entirely. Though if you don’t know about that or never find it, you may end up slightly more frustrated than some.

Outside of that, I think this mod is pretty good. I like the multiple pathways, 3d gameplay, the music, level length and overall I had a lot of fun replaying this stage multiple times. Definitely a stage that I think many fans will go back to play again more often than not in the future.

Check out the mod here on SHC’s Official Site: https://shc.zone/entries/contest2021/469