Thread the Needle

Thread the Needle is a short, minimalist precision hack that began its life as a practice environment for subtle movement control and input timing. Some of the obstacles can be quite difficult, but they are all RTA friendly. It is only 1 exit with 20 different screens. No unethical up pipes this time around, just plain old doors and each time you enter one you will get a checkpoint. Also there are no sprites, instead emphasizing raw movement and input timing obstacles while still using a few vanilla blocks to add some flavor.

This hack has become something of a zen experience for me, but I will warn that it could be frustrating even for fans of precision. You can die a lot trying to solve very small variations of your input and you could possibly spend more time respawning than actually playing the game. If working through the nuances and minutiae of an extremely specific jump and movement sequence does not sound like your idea of a good time, I’d skip this one.

Time and mileage may vary. You could clear this in a single sitting, or get stuck on a single screen for a long time. I recommend expecting some amount of grind to reduce potential frustration. It is worth noting that these obstacles are not as hard as I could have made them, they are not all equal in challenge, and the goal of this project was never to maximize difficulty. That said, some of these obstacles are the sort where frames and pixels matter.

Good luck pressing all the correct buttons at the right times and what not.

Clear video link: https://youtu.be/WILzqyjy9jI?si=013nFQ2PugDgZ7b8

1.1 Changes: Nerfed Room 9 to be less monstrous compared to its peers. Decheesed Room 19 to ensure it remains monstrous.

1.2 Changes: Used special asm to remove the death mosaic effect to prevent possible discomfort on the player’s eyes.

1.3 Changes: Nerfed Room 19 in the interest of curtailing player misery. It was in fact, too monstrous.