As Super Mario 64 was played by so many children, it is fitting that B3313 feels akin to a child's nightmare. But this ambitious romhack is more than that. Elements of all eras of Mario 64--its development, the final game, the insane folklore developed around the game's strange, primitive atmosphere in the past few years--are entangled into this sprawling expression of the Mario 64 fan's dream. The atmosphere is rarely outright scary, but never too welcoming either.

Byzantine in its construction, the unknowable nature of B3313 is its greatest asset. After awhile you might get bored of trying to find new areas, but the run back to try to reach something cool you found is unique and dream-like in itself.

The 16 consecutive hours I spent playing this for the first time are among the most remarkable game experiences I've had in awhile, and that was version 0.7, before it was updated with an insane amount of new areas, more atmosphere, and branching out in every direction. B3313 is something that could only exist now and among the most remarkable romhacks to ever exist.

It's my opinion that to fully appreciate what this game is you have to be a little obsessed with the whole Mario 64 mythology that has been built up throughout the years. Lost builds both real and fake, never ending reports of players finding eerie and unfitting elements in such a classic game that pretty much always has eyes on it, the rise of analog horror fueling a new wave of atmosphere and nostalgia focused content - everything plays a part in it.

I often see the argument that the new generation of internet users is "making horror not scary", pointing out how the Backrooms now resembles the SCP Foundation and blaming them for the mascot horror trend that has produced some less than stellar cash grabs. While I personally don't enjoy the "personalization AI" theory and many other concepts that are a bit too far off from reality... so what?

I think that, when faced with a company such as Nintendo, who has the tightest grip on what Mario is and how you should be experiencing at every second of their games with the sole intent of fueling more dollars into their bank accounts, the boldest thing you can do is create something that is cringe. Something that doesn't make sense - or rather, only makes sense to you, at a certain mindset and point in time. Become unmonetizable. Make Mario have the hyper realistic bloody eyes if you want. It's your game.

In a climate where games preservation pretty much /has/ to overlap with piracy to be effective, I think making a rom hack like this that takes elements from real old SM64 builds and combining them with fanmade concepts and rumors old and new is fantastic. It's taking this game that is held to such high standards as "the beginning of 3D gaming" or whatever and getting weird with it.

After 20+ stars of playing, it becomes impossible to differentiate what is real, fake, old or new. It's eerie and comforting and nostalgic and innovative and any other feelings that it makes you feel. It can always be "that deep". It's oddly exciting to get to play something that wasn't ready to be shown to you. Some of the maps even kill you after a certain amount of time to prevent you from seeing the unfinished content. I think that's awesome. Games don't come out of thin air ready, they go through multiple iterations and what you get from the store is the cleanest, most sanitized and marketable version.

I think Mario should run through 5 identical castle lobbies until he goes through 3 fake paintings in a row and eventually reaches a huge cake with an equally huge star - which is actually a quicksand trap that kills him instantly. I'm glad someone else agrees.

holy mackaroni i started playing this when i got very very ill with covid and it made the experience even better trying to play this with a 104 fever in a complete and utter haze, it started to bleed into my dreams too. i tried to map this out by myself without using a guide and ended up writing 84 pages of notes. this is for release 0.9 that I am marking that I "completed" it, even with the amount of exploration I did, I am sure I missed areas because there is just so much to see! i typically don't like mario 64 but the amount of work and atmosphere the creators put in is incredible - huge fan of your work (the game and otherwise) and just cant speak highly enough about this

Une lettre d'amour a la communauté de Mario 64. Le gameplay et hud de la beta, des éléments des creepypastas et legendes urbaines autour du jeu, des niveaus originaux, et d'autres provenants de sm64ds ou d'autre romhacks, et surtout, des références aux oeuvres horrifiques présentes sur internet autour du jeu. Le Plexus, la Personalisation, Stanley, L'Iceberg, TOUT. Vraiment tout est trop bien.

Tu ne joue pas a ce jeu, c'est le jeu qui te joue. Une pépite. vraiment une de mes experiences de gaming récentes préférées. J'y joue depuis 2022 et j'ai l'impression de n'avoir que effleuré la surface de ce qui est dans le jeu.

Ma romhack préférée.
Mon Mod préféré.
Un de mes jeux d'horreur préféré.
Un de mes jeux préférés.

Foncez si vous aimez la culture autour de Mario 64 comme moi.

a very unique experience. the surreal, labyrinthine nature of the hub areas was a lot of fun to figure out. unfortunately, the game does not really respect the time you put into learning it. the ending is awful, and having to find the arbitrary red stars to even see it would be pretty silly without a guide, as some of them are hidden within real levels with no indication they are there. imo they only should have all been somehow accessible through the hub areas. speaking of the levels, wow are they trash. for the most part, they dont feel like unfinished areas from the main game, they feel like baby's first mario 64 romhack. "act 1" is just silly, the "scary" parts are cringey, and there are too many repetitive stars in the levels themselves. as fun as it was in the beginning, by the end it felt like a slog, and one that required a guide despite complete memorization of how to get where. i feel as though the game needed to either be more structured, such that someone can feasibly find everything on their own (almost nobody is going to figure out to run to four corners of a random room with 0 indication of it doing anything) or further embrace the creepy nature and random events, which i feel there wasnt enough of.

i went into b3313 completely blind expecting some stupid generic mario 64 creepypasta rom hack bullshit and instead got one of the weirdest, most surreal, and dream-like experiences ive ever gotten out of a video game. everything from the music to the level design feels like some tripped up mario fans fever dream. things like the placement of the stars feel like they were just put out in the open for no reason. the maps are all so open and i kept on finding myself in places i felt like i wasnt supposed to be in. even weird technical junk like clipping through walls added to the not-quite-uneasy feeling the hack gives off. even though it does contain some spooky creepypasta stuff, its used just sparingly enough that it manages to stay interesting and doesnt feel overused or anything. the real meat of the game is exploring the castle, but a lot of painting levels have some of my favorite areas like the eel graveyard, dry town, or bob-omb battlefield during its "quiet war". every time you find a branching path youll make a mental note that youll want to check out the other path later, but by the time youre done with what you were already doing, youve usually forgotten how to even go back. its insane. im positive that i missed a ton of notable areas even after sinking almost over a day into it. b3313 definitely shouldnt be viewed with a gamer mindset. the platforming and gameplay isnt super tight and fun/challenging or anything like that, but i dont think it should be either. if you want more mario 64, there are more than enough hacks to hold you over, but this hack in particular takes total advantage of the game it was built on and really just mystifies me more than anything else, which is a breath of fresh air. if youre gonna recommend this to a friend, dont tell them anything about it. dont show them a map, or tell them where to go. just let them get lost

Most of the levels in this ROM-hack have awful level design and look like they took 10 minutes to make. A level (the empty castle with only the bob-omb painting room) in this hack is even downright plagiarized from a hack called sm64.z64. (at least, that level was present in the version of the hack I played at the time I wrote this review. I don't know if it's still there in the final release.)
You might say "oh the personalization AI is making the levels, so they are meant to look bad!", but honestly I think that's a stupid excuse to justify this hack being good just because you like the idea of a "malicious AI that messes with your video game". I'm not going to lie when I say that I like that idea too, but this hack terribly executes every aspect of it. I'm not immersed at all. It doesn't even feel "personalized". It feels shoddy.

The custom songs in this hack are have terrible instrument choices and melodies that are unpleasant to listen to.

Some of the assets used are inaccurate to the Super Mario 64 Beta (as an example: the HUD), and the custom textures used in the levels. While I know that this is a trivial issue to most people, this is a big part of what ruins the feeling of this being the "real" beta to me.

And lastly, I'm not sure if this is still true or not, but the big issue that used to or is still plaguing this ROM-hack's coding process is that it uses ROM Manager instead of the fan decompilation of Super Mario 64. Basically, it uses archaic tools which makes it harder to implement ideas into the ROM-hack, which might explain why some things are the way they are.

There could've been so much more done with this idea. But sadly, the Super Mario 64 beta community is filled with a bunch of jerks (Trust me when I say that there are a lot of edgy bigots and racists in the Super Mario 64 beta community, as I had been pretty active in this community even before the gigaleak happened) that don't know what they're doing.

Anyways, where the frick is Wario !!! /hj

if i had a nickel for every time this year i played a mod for a classic game from the 90s heavily influenced by yume nikki and the internet's fascination with "liminal spaces," i'd have ten cents. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice.

anyways, growing up i always felt a sense of unease playing super mario 64, though very specifically when exploring the castle. N64 games at large had that kind of creepy effect about them; donkey kong 64 is another example of something just feeling really off about the atmosphere in the titles of that specific system. the "every copy of mario 64 is personalized" meme from the pandemic era always struck me as really cool in that way since i liked that people were capitalizing on something i'd always observed since i was a kid.

b3313 truly shines whenever it's leaning hard into that specific feeling and the dreamlike manner in which its labyrinthine world is tied together. exploration and quiet unease are far more effective than the cheap jump scares and heavy-handed "horror" moments or attempts at Lore. i understand much of the game's more typical and overt horror elements are nods to some of the more (in)famous net series based on the "every copy of mario 64 is personalized" meme, but the jumpscares get irritating after you encounter several in a row and it's a bit hard to take the Scary Lore seriously when it's juxtaposed against literally fucking super mario.

once again i feel b3313 is at its best when it's in its element and doing its own thing built on the foundation of mario 64's innate uneasiness; the moments that got an audible "what the fuck" out of me were when the game seemed to defy any attempt at being understood even by the logic it had previously established and seemed to act arbitrarily without any reason or justification. surreality and abstractions are more often than not more evocative than anything else in this sort of medium, and it's important to remember that the reason uboa is so widely beloved is that he's yume nikki's only real jumpscare. the other memorable scares in yume nikki (such as FACE) approach more slowly and give the player time to simply sink into the dread and incomprehensibility of what they're witnessing; more often than not true horror comes in the way that a scare sticks in your mind rather than the adrenaline it evokes out of you when it makes itself known.

basically: creepy atmosphere, disorienting and confusing gameplay loops, subtlety and opaqueness? good! jumpscares, Scary Lore, and zoomer horror tropes? less good!

obligatory mention of the herculean technical effort this mod had to have been. i remember my first time emulating mario 64 i was wowed by how you could change mario's color to make him kinda look like luigi. how far we have come!