Super Meat Boy

Completely irrelevant (but incredibly fun) fact: I watched Indie Game: The Movie, the documentary about the making of this game and FEZ, about a decade before playing SMB itself.

Does Super Meat Boy live up to the hype? I’m inclined to say no. I understand why it’s historically important – it helped ignite the indie boom of the 2010s – but playing it in 2022 I found it was often more frustrating than fun.

Meat Boy is a tad bit slippery, just like Mario, and slides across surfaces like they’re glazed with a thin layer of ice. Seeing as he’s continually drenched in own blood, Meat Boy has a defensible excuse for his slipperiness. But that leads me to wonder: What’s Mario’s deal? Extreme perspiration? Moisturizer addiction? Maybe he’s just a literal grease monkey? The world may never know.

Playing Super Meat Boy to completion reminded me how fickle opinions can be. As I struggled to pass the final levels, I could feel my provisional opinion of the game slowly creep upward. Why? Human brains hate cognitive dissonance, and mine was trying to justify why I was making such a heroic effort to beat this annoying bugger of a game! It was struggling balance deeply considered yet entirely contradictory thoughts such as “This game suckz” and “Must win the game (for great justice)”.

Finish it I did. Return for more punishment in Bandage Girl’s levels and the Dark World I will not. Play it, should you? Sure, you could play it. Or you could instead play a classic like Shovel Knight, or Mega Man X4 [ロックマンX4], or one of the hundreds of other precision platformers that have come out over the last decade. If you dig hard enough, you’re sure to find dozens, if not hundreds, that are more fun and less sadistic than this one.

If Super Meat Boy doesn’t give you an aneurysm, at the very least it will give you post-traumatic stress disorder. In what has to be one of the most difficult games commercially released in years, Super Meat Boy is a strangely addictive, minimalist platformer. Its creators, Team Meat, are sadistic pranksters. Their heart belongs to the ’80s — the game’s worlds open with cinematics parodying intros from classic games, and some levels imitate Game Boy and Atari 2600 visuals — but the game’s clever, refined design suggests they aren’t stuck in the past. In fact, the game includes 12 playable characters from recent indie hits, such as Braid and BIT.TRIP RUNNER.

Super Meat Boy is a sequel to the 2-year-old Newgrounds flash game Meat Boy. The spirit and mechanics remain the same: You run and jump across 350+ stages that are typically beat in under 30 seconds. Above all, you die a lot. A whole lot. One of the most amusing additions is the replay video you are shown at the end of completing a stage. In it, you see every attempt you made overlapping each other. It’s a cathartic moment of victory as you watch 30 or more failed attempts running into buzz saws, as one determined Meat Boy makes it to the end. As charming and well designed as the game is, the game’s rapid-fire level design and disjointed structure keep it from being elevated to the level of VVVVVV, a very similar game released earlier in 2010. Super Meat Boy is a flawed love letter to all things retro and indie. It’s a tough love that will leave your thumbs sore for days.