Best Of

If you haven't heard of Super Meat Boy by now, you should pat yourself on the back - you did it. You've lived under your rock long enough to legitimately miss a chunk of pop culture. Super Meat Boy is a very fast paced action platformer, which is about all you need to know about that. No fancy gimmicks or weird twists here - just a 2D physics engine, a start, a goal, and some obstacles. This is a game worth playing. Everything about this game is rock solid. Let's dive in a little deeper: *Note the intense stylization. This persists throughout the game, and is wonderful.*
Super Meat Boy is super cute... but not cute in a 'cuddly animals' sort of way. Cute in the sort of way that @TroubleBaker's drawings of unicorns vomiting rainbows are cute - like, gross-cute. Someone-drew-eyeballs-and-a-mouth-on-a-cartoon-turd cute. You're inundated with it the whole game - the titular protagonist is literally a chunk of meat with a very simple, round-eyed face. One of the bosses is a trio of angry-looking, screaming worms with the same simple face, but a single tooth in each mouth. At one point, you meet little red crawling meats that are the happiest little dudes (and who will also rip Meat Boy's face off). Cute, cute, cute. *Even with a black-eye and a missing tooth, look how happy that sumbitch is.*
SMB is full of social media humor - not the twitter kind, the reddit kind. As you enter each world, a three-note riff commonly associated with dramatic chipmunk is played. The earth beneath Meat Boy's feet has a face that looks like it came straight out of a rage-comic (and in fact, the community-driven download center opens with a picture of Forever Alone Guy). Characters from other video games show up, too - the headcrab from halflife, or the protagonist from bit trip runner. *After dying and visiting hell, Meat Boy returns to find that apparently the rapture has happened? Note the earth's face.*
It's worth noting that the humor is more than a little juvenile... I mean, you're playing a slab of Meat trying to save his girlfriend - who is wrapped in bandages and dripping calamine lotion - from the evil Dr. Fetus. You will fight and then befriend a literal piece of shit. You will watch characters flip one another (and you) off. It'd be eye-rolling if it weren't so absurdly cute and silly at the same time. The game doesn't take itself seriously, either, which is a real breath of fresh air in this day and age (and in this backlog). A game that can laugh at itself really goes the distance - I can think of more than one pile of trash that I've reviewed that could have been infinitely better had they just been willing to prod the fourth wall a bit! As an example of this self-awareness, the characters are well aware that Meat Boy dies and respawns, which is an interesting dynamic (in fact, when visiting Hell, Meat Boy sees some of his old corpses... and in a cutscene later in the game, Meat Boy gets killed and spawns behind Dr. Fetus). As another example, PETA made a spoof of Super Meat Boy called "Super Tofu Boy," which (naturally) didn't have NEARLY the reception... but for giggles, SMB then released an update for _their_ game, which made our good-old soy-based friend playable, too! To add even more humor to the mix, the SMB version of Tofu Boy doesn't run as fast or jump as high (due to iron deficiency), and is constantly saying 'kill me.' Hee hee! SMB throws back to retro-style video-gaming days, too, complete with useless scores and start screens - each reference is usually on the other side of a purple portal (heralded by the sound of an overexcited man yelling "WARP ZOOOOONE!"), and is usually in the shape of a couple 8-bit levels set in what looks to be an old handheld device. *The view after blowing in the old Meat Boy cartridge.*
*Remember when games started you with a base score, as if score ever mattered?*
The artwork for the game is also spot-on - every level fits the overarching theme of the world very well - backgrounds are interesting enough to matter, but not so interesting to take away from the foreground. Parallax and shadow are used to give the levels a real 3D-feel, but the art is never so complex that it loses its whimsical, cartoony feel. We should talk for a minute about the audio. Whoever directed the audio in this game is an absolute genius. The music is pumping, makes it hard to get upset with the game (more on that in a minute), and gets you good and energized. The sound effects are nicely detailed - down to the 'squick-squick-squick' of Meat Boy's feet, or the "CHOMP" sound made by the only enemy with teeth taking a bite out of you! Missiles sound like proper missiles, but somehow... cartoony. Everything just _fits._ No sound is out of place. And now, dear reader, my favorite bit. The gameplay. This game is HARD. But what's brilliant is that it's hard in a careful fashion. The game knows you probably won't down every level, so they don't require you to - you can skip ahead (to a point), and only need to complete a threshold of levels to work on the boss. The game knows you'll be dying left-and-right... so they got rid of any lengthy spawn animation, the music won't skip during a death, and most levels are very, very short (meaning dying doesn't put you back very far). There are maybe three or four exceptions to this rule, and they're absolutely awful - these are the only levels that spurred me to massive frustration as I played. The game has additional extra levels - a 'dark world' for levels you've already completed, outrageously difficult 'warp zone' stages, and an entire extra-hard world devoted to Bandage Girl after beating up Dr Fetus. The game even has an "A+" rating for completing levels within a certain (doable) time. But do you need to play these extra levels or meet the A+ requirement to beat the game? No, gentle reader, you do not! SMB lets YOU decide how hard you want it to be! The game realizes that it requires careful positioning and split-second timing, so it provides you with a (perfectly thematic) method of charting your mistakes: Meat Boy leaves a trail of meat goop on anything he touches! *A fresh, untouched level...*
*...ends up covered in meat after a couple attempts!*
Because the game knows it's hard, it's deliberately reduced the anti-fun feedback associated with losing - which is a sign of mighty good design! The player may never notice the lack of spawn time or long spawn animation, or the continuity of the music, or the general brevity of each level - but very careful design consideration must have taken place for each of these EXCELLENT features, which to me is positively beautiful. And look at the result! I have a game where when I lose, I often laugh at the tension release rather than throw the keyboard (YES KEYBOARD) across the room. A game I can pick up for five minutes, push through a few levels, and set right back down again. A game where I can really get some momentum rolling and start to feel very skillful, despite dying twenty times for every success. TWENTY TIMES. Can you imagine dying that many times to get through a level of Super Mario Bros? You'd pull your hair out! I am VERY pleased with Super Meat Boy. I would give this sucker a firm 10/10, and pray that more game designers take its lessons to heart! We need more games that know what they are, laugh about it, and structure in-game penalties in such a way that players don't feel punished for playing. Good on you, Team Meat. Good on you.