Super Meat Boy is a brutally challenging game that quite often left me feeling as if I were on the brink of losing my sanity as a result of pure rage — and I loved every painful minute of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a masochist. At least I don’t think I am. The game simply did a remarkable job of keeping me coming back to the unapologetic pounding it gave me time and time again. This is accomplished so well through finely tuned gameplay mechanics that leave no room for doubt that the reason you died was your fault, and not the game’s. It also doesn’t hurt that the game is genuinely charming.
A lot of the sadistic charm comes from Super Meat Boy‘s loving homages to the 8-bit games of old. When you start up the game’s very first chapter, for instance, you’re treated with a cutscene that puts an entertaining twist on the intro to Street Fighter 2. There’s plenty more where that came from, too.
You’ll naturally start off on relatively easy levels, but by the time you’ve made your way to the end of the first chapter, the game will start preparing you for the brutality that awaits you in the remaining 6 chapters. Brutality that will very frequently test the absolute maximum capacity of your tolerance.
Not only do the levels gradually ramp up in difficulty the further along you go, there’s also the Dark World to consider. In order to access the “Dark” version of a level, you’re tasked with completing it under the par time to score an A+, after which you can press the X button on the level select screen to shift the chapter into the “Dark World” version. These variations are, as the name suggests, significantly more challenging, and I admittedly couldn’t make it through very many of the game’s Dark World variants.
To add even more challenge to the levels (or to add insult to injury), there are also bandages and hidden warp zones to be found. The process of collecting these hidden goodies ranges from the reasonable to the damn-near impossible. Despite being generally painful to collect, figuring out what angles to approach in order to grab them is strangely addictive, and it adds even more depth and challenge to each of the levels. And yes, there’s actually hard incentive to put yourself through finding these things.
The incentive comes from the ability to unlock a variety of characters through the collection of bandages, as well as by way of special red warp zones. Stars of other Indie games make an appearance as said unlockable characters, with faces such as Tim from Braid, Commander Video from Bit.Trip, and Hominid from Alien Hominid making cameo appearances. Not only does each character obviously differ from Meat Boy aesthetically, they also have their own unique set of abilities to set them apart. They also happen to be just as much fun to play as Meat Boy is.
There’s a whole lot of game to be had in Super Meat Boy. When you take into account the Dark World and the hidden Warp Zone levels, the game boasts roughly 300 levels for you to test your mettle in. The developers did a fantastic job of gradually ramping up the difficulty of these levels as you move along, and it never stops being fun, no matter how frustrating it may be.
It is so fun and so polished, in fact, that I would find it difficult not to recommend this game to anyone with so much as a slight interest in platformers. With that being said, I would probably avoid this if you’re not the type of gamer who can stomach the unforgiving difficulty of the game’s later levels. If you’re willing to dive into the devilishly charming world of Super Meat Boy, however, you’ll find one of the most polished, challenging and downright fun platformers to come out in many years.
Score: 10/10 – Outstanding
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