Super Meat Boy Review (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch & PC)

Looking back at the pools of bloody red meat juices that, due to no fault of my own, I left behind on a battlefield of grotesque spikes of skewered cubes, I knew that Super Meat Boy would eventually get the best of me. I figured, if I could beat just one level without making a mess, then I’d be able to conquer just about any feat or obstacle that its carnivorous platform would put out before me. But I was wrong, and the thousand crimson graves illuminated that bitter reality more than ever. I was way out of my league, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Yet, like a good steak on a hot plate, I annoyingly found myself aggressively chewing at it again and again, not to satisfy a craving, but to prove that I could waffle it down if I just fooled myself into thinking that it was a tender delicacy and not a chewy substance of iron bone fragments and fleshy hacksaw blades.

Frankly, no amount of experience in the world would have prepared me for Super Meat Boy. Initially fooled by its cartoon appearance and seemingly harmless UI, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was “just another platforming game” that I could breeze through in a couple of hours and leave behind. But, a couple of bites in, and that god complex soon left me for the wolves. A hundred corpses later, and it hit me like a freight train. Suddenly, I hated the meat, and I loathed Bandage Girl and her irritating habit of getting into trouble. Yet, I felt that I had a job to do. Like Mario and his thousandth pilgrimage to rescue Princess Peach, I felt that it was something that only I could accomplish, even if it would eventually result in my sanity whittling down to a pittance.

Behind the toothy grin and “friendly” exterior of Super Meat Boy’s sirloin steak-oriented world is an à la carte of blood, sweat and tears—a three-hundred course banquet of painfully bitter appetizers that each have their own thick consistency and dank texture. Similar to your traditional good-versus-evil recipe, the game primarily consists of a hearty portion of stages, chapters, and carnivorous boss battles. Oh, you’ve definitely seen this all before in alternate platforming games. But, what you haven’t seen before, much less sampled, is the blood that frequently oozes from your lower lip as you relentlessly poke and prod the bear that is Super Meat Boy’s unforgiving climate. This, really, is what sets it apart from its tender kin.

To state the obvious, Super Meat Boy isn’t an easy game. Heck, it isn’t even a forgiving game that gives you the chance to learn the ropes and master the basics over a generous period of time. No, what Super Meat Boy does is drop you into a world where blades and blocks, traps and flailing objects congregate, and then tasks you with navigating it. It doesn’t tell you how to overcome your problems, only that, should you fail to reach the end, then you’ll have to start over from scratch. You cannot fight, and you cannot make warm campfires to manually save your progress. It’s just you, a hailstorm of obstacles, and a simple goal.

While the general premise of Super Meat Boy sounds like a walk in the park, the truth is that the process of tackling the world and all of its fleshy barricades is anything but smooth and stylish. As a result of Meat Boy’s lack of spatial awareness and skill, the game requires you to carefully calculate your movements—a juggling act that involves timing jumps and moves in a consistent manner, and tackling various objects whilst actively working to avoid a fatal injury. Here’s the catch: you don’t have lives or checkpoints, just pools of meat juice that leave a mark on the world after you fail to make ends meet. It’s brutal, unforgiving, and yet, above all else, stupidly entertaining.

I’ll admit that, once you look beyond the ludicrously complex nature of the level designs, Super Meat Boy does, in fact, become a lot more enjoyable to romp through. Granted, its difficulty curve is absurd, but it also makes an effort to compensate for its uphill battle with a plethora of great features, with some excellent boss battles and plenty of creative set pieces to work through. What’s more, as it fosters hundreds of stages and a “bonus” mode that allows for you to slip into the “Dark World”—an alternate universe that adopts tougher versions of the same levels—the game brings a ton of replay value to the dining table. To add, it houses a creative suite that allows players to craft their own levels and share them, which, again, further bolsters the meat of the game’s appeal.

Alongside a meaty collection of creative stages and boss battles, Super Meat Boy produces some excellent audiovisual effects and animation work. Conceptually, it’s all rather straightforward. Yet, beneath its skeletal structure lies a lot of protein that can keep you busy for hours. That is, of course, provided that you can quench your insatiable appetite for tough-as-nails gameplay and nauseating level designs. If you can get over that hurdle, then you might just find yourself scoffing down Super Meat Boy like an all you can eat hot dog buffet.

Verdict

Super Meat Boy doesn’t beat around the bush with its absurdly high saturated fats and stomach-churning difficulty spikes. Yet, beneath its chunky exterior of meat juices and bone broth lies a unique and oddly gripping à la carte of extravagant flavors and stages, bosses and creative recipes. It’s still enough to make you sick to your stomach I’ll admit, but if you can pull yourself together long enough to sample its sweet, sweet nectar, then you might just find yourself falling head over heels in love with just about everything that comes with the serving dish. You’ll hate it, but you’ll also find that, the more you consume, the more you’ll be eating out the palm of its hand. It’s the sickness bug that comes after ingesting it in large quantities, that’s the problem.