>>57831216Snakewood is great because it is a complete Gen 3 hack with a strange premise and a creator with sensibilities and humor extremely specific to the 2000s. At a time when very few people made complete romhacks like Snakewood, Cutlerine made a full length hack with an original story not involving the gym sequence, but he did it his way.
The game is a total joke, with a sense of humor that was 5 years out of date when it was released. It was clearly started as some kind of serious horror hack, but extremely early into development was turned into a mid-2000s edgy comedy hack.
Despite this, the game design is uncommonly spot on for a romhack. It's a difficulty hack, but you'll never have to do any EV minmaxing bullshit. Instead, the game is balanced around expecting you to use fakemon which are intentionally designed to overcome the game's hardest trainers. Trainers will regularly have boss pokemon with BST in the 800s, but they're no match for your fully setup Kenchukuo.
It's held back by the bugs. Calling the game finished is a bit of an exaggeration. The final version is still very much an early beta where it's not just possible to softlock yourself, beating the game without softlocking yourself requires specific knowledge ahead of time. The game is known for leaving a very bad taste in people's mouths because you are very unlikely to softlock until about 80% of the way through the game, after which point there are well over 10 ways to easily softlock yourself. The end of the game is a massive gauntlet you are expected to undertake in one go without saving or having access to your box. Whereas modern romhacks would enforce this through some custom scripting, Snakewood never got that far. Save during the final gauntlet of the game because you didn't know it was a gauntlet? Your save is fucking toast kiddo, no way to ever enter the final dungeon again.
