Abyss Cycle

What it is

A Super Metroid ROM hack in the spirit of Loop Hero. Samus starts in a map room with Morph Ball and a handful of credits. Its station opens a board where you lay rooms door to door, from cards in your hand, until a loop runs out and back home.

Each loop deals new rooms. Item spots roll again. Ammo is lost, but suits and beams stay.
Enemies and bosses toughen every loop. Killing enemies and visiting rooms pay credits.
Cards drop from enemies: rooms, and modifiers like Treasure and Nest.
Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon and Ridley wait below elevators you link into the board.
Choose your difficulty, start room and seed when a new cycle begins.
Most cycles end in the abyss. That's the game: delete your save and begin another.
No need to redownload, you can change your seed each time you start a new game.

How a cycle goes

The builder: rooms from the hand laid door to door, credits falling from 20 to 1 — **Build the loop.** Lay rooms from your hand door to door. Costs to lay depend on the room and a few other things, experiment with it to figure it out. Green arrows lead on from the start room, yellow ones lead home. Once you have a working loop the arrows go away, but you can place more rooms if you want.

Free road pieces: three shafts and a corner bridge the gap and close the loop — **Use free rooms to make things work.** When no room in your hand lines up, free road pieces do: corridors, shafts and corners cost nothing and close loops that couldn't close otherwise. Connecting multiple 'free' room tiles together will construct a single large custom room. You can softlock really easily, no logic checks your current gear, etc. So you may skip using rooms you can't complete. And I haven't added too much visual indicators besides notes extracted from sm json about the room you're placing, so read the stuff below your hand about the room you're placing.

The map room at loop 12, its colours drained, the HUD counting 12 loops — **The world wears down.** Every loop enemy life and damage goes up (and goes up faster at higher difficulties), and Zebes colors shift to dull as the abyss consumes more.

The setup page: difficulty, start room, seed and wall jumps — **Every cycle is new.** Pick a difficulty, a start room and a seed, and ledges if wall jumps aren't your thing (custom corridors will be much faster to traverse if you're good at wall jumping, I'm not good at creating nice looking rooms).

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Give your Super Metroid ROM

Super Metroid (Japan, USA), .smc or .sfc, with or without a copier header. Your ROM never leaves your browser.
Drop your ROM here, or click to choose it Remember it on this device
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Playing

Play the .sfc in any accurate SNES emulator (bsnes, Snes9x, BizHawk, Mesen) or on a flash cart. The game saves at the map station; a death costs you the loop.

Changelog

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What it is

How a cycle goes

Get it

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Give your Super Metroid ROM

Download

Playing

Changelog