I was originally interested in it after seeing some map design changes from the thumbnail and from the very first room, but an hour in I realized what kind of hack this REALLY is… So, let’s sum up the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Rearranges the map’s exits so the castle can wrap around, backtracking is quicker, and crossing whole areas takes less time.
• Greatly buffs drop rate, making some obnoxious souls much easier to get.
• “This or That” rooms that allows you to pick a reward way ahead of its original time.
• Some rooms have been redesigned to be more interesting.
• Some Souls are more accessible, specially MP-wise and placement wise.

Cons:

• There’s only one difficulty: VERY HARD. Everything deals a LOT of damage, no matter how deep you are in the castle or not. Even at level 10+ you’ll be afraid bumping into zombies and taking 20+ damage while getting juggled and having less than 400 max health.
• Everything is a damage sponge. They resist pretty much everything at them, which results in a whole other problem that deserves its own bullet point down the road, and that is…
• There is too much menuing! One of the things I absolutely hate in action games is having to pause, switch weapon to something this one enemy blocking my way is weak to, see the enemy takes little damage, realize it’s not what I THOUGHT it was, pause, change to another, kill the enemy, and have to repeat this with almost every SINGLE enemy.
• 90% of the screens so far: enemy spam. They have no rhyme nor reason, sometimes they are positioned in a way you won’t have much space to deal with the enemy right before you, and then there are boss rooms with respawning enemies (specially ghosts) that will make things more cluttered than it should be.
• Because of all of the above, at least 50% of the time you’ll be standing still, healing with the Giant Worm soul which is easily accessible early on if you are clever enough with the Winged Skeleton soul.

Perhaps this hack shouldn’t have aimed it to be this hard, and only retained map changes instead, or perhaps just force the game’s default hard mode and leave a harder mode as a separate patch.