I am kind of on my second wave of playing through every Metroid hack that made some kind of waves in the community. Lost Chozo is a Zero Mission hack, which I tend to prefer due to the controls and map improvements over the SNES era. And this one is decent - nothing stands out too much but there are some really fun level design moments.

At the same time, there is some very frustrating level design elements as well. The game is pretty linear, you often get bottlenecked into an area with only one path forward. Once you find that path (which can take a while due to some extremely well-hidden destructible blocks), the game sort of shimmies you along to the next area. All of a sudden around the 8 hour mark, I was thrust into the ending sequence without ever having gotten a chance to backtrack and attempt to 100% the map.

My only other complaint besides the lack of opportunities to backtrack and find secrets is the lack of any map QoL features to encourage it. In the best rom hacks, devs will include completion trackers for each area (either % counter or a x/y list). In the even better ones like Subversion, you can find an item that will reveal the area for all missing secrets on the map. This has neither, so it kinda takes the wind out of the sails for me as a completionist.

Otherwise, nothing glaringly wrong with the hack aside from the sequencing issues. I had a decent time until it was cut very short. I'd give it like.. a 4.5/10