The End Is Nigh

A 'spiritual successor' to Super Meat Boy, inasmuch as being another tough as nails tight 2D platformer where you expect to die a _lot_. The unique innovation is the semi-open world design where each level flows into another as opposed to being discrete segments, and numerous collectibles and hidden areas scattered about.

Unfortunately, despite 106%'ing Super Meat Boy, I've ended up bouncing twice from The End Is Nigh. Its a combination of factors, movement feels more restrictive, ledge grabbing can be inconsistent, a larger emphasis on puzzles being all about 'timing', and the game itself is wrapped in a grey and melancholic "why bother?" attitude compared to Super Meat Boy's relatively colourful and upbeat attitude, encouraging you to persevere. The End Is Nigh does the opposite, and so it makes it a lot harder mentally to work through.

It's tight 2D platforming like Super Meat Boy, yes, but it isn't fun like Super Meat Boy was. The movement doesn't feel as good. The levels are incredibly frustrating, more being about memorizing the timing of moving blocks or enemies, or the pixel-perfect movement around spikes. Just about every level is an exercise in obnoxious precision button-pressing with few breathers in between. Even when the levels are on the easier side, they're not very satisfying to figure out, and when you die it feels more like cheap level design tricking you instead of it being your own fault.

End is Night is kind of a spiritual successor to Super Meat Boy, its a tough as nails platformer where you need to make precise jumps and consists of multiple screens. Each World has roughly 20 screens and there are a total of around 10 Worlds. Each screen has hidden objects called tumors that you can collect, as well as several hidden areas that offer additional challenges to get even more tumors. There are other hidden items called cartridges that allow you to go through incredibly difficult platforming stages that give you additional tumors upon completion. Once you complete the main game, you unlock alternate versions of the Worlds you previously visited that are more difficult and tumors you previously collected act as lives and when you lose all the tumors you restart from the beginning of that World. Their are something like 6 of these Worlds.

My main problem with End is Nigh is it doesn't offer the amount of variety or customization as Meat Boy. In End is Nigh all you really can do is jump, their is no dash button, you can't change your costume to give you additional abilities like you could in Meat Boy. End is Nigh starts off easier than Meat Boy but once you get to the alternate version of the levels, it becomes frustratingly hard. In Meat Boy I never had issues with the preciseness or controls, if I ever died I found it was my own fault of mistiming something. But in this I often found myself dying due to cheap obstacles or the weird timing of jumps. Something just felt a little off about this. Meat Boy was difficult, but the only real difficult parts of Meat Boy were the retro stages and some of the later dark World stages. But Meat Boy I managed to nearly 100% and almost collected all bandages, this game I barely could make it through the early alternate stages and it felt a bit cheap the game gave you limited lives only on the hardest stages. Meat Boy was a game I look fondly back on and everything from the design, music, unlockable characters was memorable, but End is Nigh is mostly forgettable with a few decent challenges that are fun, but mostly is frustrating and doesn't have the variety or uniqueness of Meat Boy.