Trapped in a twisted dream where she is revered as a goddess, Junko must face the horrifying serpent that worships her.
Base Game: Super Metroid
Content Warnings: Artistic Nudity, Body Horror, Hanging Corpses
Sicko Warnings: Walljumping (timing is easier), Underwater Segment
Last year's Junkoid 1 was a curious, fascinating little total conversion. In it, you play as a cute witch girl (the titular Junko) walking around in her little dream world,1 zapping typical metroidian dive-bombing or wall-crawling enemies with her wand, and exploring environments with the usual assortment of rocks, tubes, panels, bubbles, and statues as one would find in a typical metroidian planet. But, perhaps because of the cutesy protagonist, the author (who goes by "P. Yoshi") saw fit to heighten the underlying horror motifs of the original game, and create an even wider chasm between the protagonist and the world.
Early on, after navigating some marginally damp caves underneath a snowfield, you see an elevator helpfully marked "SHEOL." If you are brave enough to go down it, you are greeted with an impressively grotesque fleshzone. Piles of skulls are caked into the cave walls, and fleshy, serpentine tubes route themselves every which way, and they writhe -- oh how they writhe and wriggle (the animation is genuinely quite impressive/gross). You either instantly nope out of the area (wise), or you nope out of there after dying and discovering there is nothing you can do there (wise, belatedly).
From that point on, the tone is set.
Perhaps trusting the unease this kind of opening would put in the player, the author did not feel compelled to be excessive in any other facet of design. The world is not huge and bloated, the difficulty is not tuned for kaizo-heads, and the secrets do not cater to obscuritanists. Confident in the strength of its thematic dressing, the rest of the game is free to be a tightly-constructed, non-linear search-action game with effective level design that doesn't over-marinate in its own cleverness (clever as it may be). The highest mark I can give this hack is that one of my friends (who typically bounces off of metroid hacks due to various thorny facets of their design (that we sickos are so quick to ignore or dismiss)) said some kind words about it at the end of last year.
Now as for Super Junkoid2: while the same _=/Seal of Approval\=_ from my non-hacker peer group is still pending (I need a couple more opinions before I can claim a Hivemind Consensus), I can speak for myself and say that I think it handily accomplishes its goal: it's Junkoid, but Super. The unnerving, grotesque imagery of the original is expanded on thanks to the visual prowess of the SNES, and the more flexible and well-dissected engine of Super Metroid is leveraged to provide richer and more "chocolatey" mechanics. Other, more workman-like facets of the design, such as the compact scope of the world, the clear telegraphing of secrets, the non-linear progression, and generally accessible difficulty, still remain as they were (much to the hack's benefit).
Overall, contrary to the title of this post only listing a single hack, I recommend playing both of these.
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The setting/characters in these hacks originate from a short RPG the author made for a game jam a few years back, so if any of this carries some whiffs of Yume Nikki then you have your answer as to why. The game's blog is still up with some screenshots here, but the author removed the download link for personal reasons. (I'm not sure what madness drove this author to pivot to romhacks, but I'm all for it tbh.)
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Note: Super Junkoid is Junkoid 3, sequel to a hypothetical Junkoid 23
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my DMs are open p yoshi.