Super Meat Boy Review

I mean...It's Super Meat Boy.

But, okay. I'm gonna pretend for a moment that you were living under a rock...Or at the very least, like me, kind of let this one slip by you and never swung back to it during its initial heyday. (If that's not you and you just need to know if it's a good rendition of your favorite meat-themed game: Yeah it's a good port okay click some ads on the way out please bye)

Super Meat Boy is what we in the games press call, and I'm gonna use some deep insider parlance here, a "hard-as-hell platformer". The premise, is simple. You are Meat Boy, a boy made of meat. You are in love with Bandage Girl, a girl either covered in or composed entirely of bandaging. Doctor Fetus, a fetus with the suit of a man, does not like this, and thus kidnaps Bandage Girl. It's a tale as old as meat. You must thus navigate the deadly obstacle courses that Doctor Fetus has put between you and Bandage Girl, who serves as mostly a flagpole with a face.

Yeah I'm gonna tell you now if you're looking for deep-cut rejections of the "rescue the princess who could be replaced with a sexy lamp" story, you're not gonna get it here. There's a whole rich debate that this leaves us with, on the value of story and the way that we mistake "statements we're used to hearing" with "not making a statement", but that's...Well it's a big ol' can of worms that I don't want to crack open here.

So here's the deal. Meat Boy, is a fast running, fast jumping, fast falling little blob of muscles. He can run, jump, wall jump, sprint, your classic Mario verbs. And the comparisons to Mario are no mistake, because Super Meat Boy is born of the era of Kaizo Mario, I Wanna Be The Guy, and other real formative points in the hard-as-hell-platformer subgenre.

Just like those, the levels you'll face will be tiny little 10 to 45 second numbers, often just one or two platforming gimmicks to force you through...And those gimmicks will be brutally punishing, demanding precision jumps and incredibly tight timing. Meat Boy's a one-hit wonder, so running into anything sufficiently deadly means back to the start of the level for you.

The good news is that, much like what that whole genre became, Super Meat Boy gives you infinite lives and no continue limits. You punch through the singular challenges one at a time, with however many attempts it'll take...Though just for funsies, when you finally beat a level, it stacks all your attempts together in the quick replay. Watch a small army of Meat Boys leap into buzz saws, fall into the abyss, careen straight into piles of used syringes, each one leaving their trail of meat-juice (that's deep cut industry parlance for blood) behind in a glorious display of core and chaos.

Again, I'm not telling you anything new here, really. This game's been out for...Hold on lemme check...Good lord, the very first version came out in 2010. Well that sure explains a lot about its art style, and the Newgrounds logo that comes up when you boot the game.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Newgrounds logo? I had a whole weird wave of nostalgia remembering crummy sprite animations and weird music videos when I saw that. God, those were strange days.

Sorry, I lost my train of thought. ...Right, Super Meat Boy! The game's honestly a bit difficult to summarize, because so much of it is just variations on this core ruleset. You enter a super hard platforming level. You try to reach the flagpole I mean Bandage Girl, and then you die, and then you try again, repeat until you get there. Maybe you stop to dive into a portal and get a bonus stage, or to grab a bandage hanging over a precarious ledge for other unlockables.

So here's the thing. The question you have to ask is whether or not this is worth it for you, based largely on previous exposure to the property. Do you already have a copy of Super Meat Boy on something you still have hooked up? Do you have it on something you can take out of the house with you? Does being able to get your meat on, on the go, even matter to you?

These are the real questions you have to ask yourself. Because, the thing is, if you've never played Super Meat Boy before? Yeah, this is a great port of it. All it's missing is the original music...Which the other ports after the original releases are also missing due to licensing stuff.

If, on the other hand, you've got it already on Steam, or maybe on your PS4, or something else still in actual use...Then it's a bit harder to justify. About the only major exclusive Switch content is a competitive race mode, which is cool, but I'm not sure you could hang an entire second purchase on it.

So, yeah. I can't throw a full Recommended on this, but it's not because it's a bad game. It's just that it's a game that's been on so many damn things, that quite frankly you probably have a copy you've forgotten about on some platform or another.

Sequel looks pretty damn cool, though.