Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is easily one of the most iconic indie games ever made. It's a brutally difficult experience with tight controls, a unique visual identity, and excellent music that still holds up today.

Super Meat Boy, similarly to the game of the same initials, is a simple platformer where you play as Meat Boy and have to save his love interest Bandage Girl. The only twist is that the levels you have to platform through are incredibly difficult. Super Meat Boy is a hard game with tons of obstacles scattered all over its levels and it only gets worse over time. Despite this, the game rarely feels overly frustrating due to a variety of factors. First and most importantly, the controls are spot on. The only options are to run, jump, and sprint, but you have full control of Meat Boy in the air, and while running makes it easier for you to pull off large jumps, you are also more slippery and it's tougher to land. This game is purely skill-based, whenever I die, I rarely feel like it's my fault. In addition, the many levels are incredibly short and retrying a level is pretty much instant, so when you do die, you don't waste too much time. The only exception to this is in the boss fights, which are easily the game's weakest aspect. Not only are these boss fights long and grueling, but they're not even all that fun most of the time, with the worst being the fourth boss which is pretty much a trial-and-error gauntlet. The best boss in Super Meat Boy is the third boss, Brownie, who you have to defeat through a short race, it's the only boss that felt fun and rewarding to master and I wish there was more like him.

Super Meat Boy is chock-full of content. Each of the seven worlds has twenty levels and a boss, and once you beat a world, you unlock a Dark World variant that gives you harder versions of every single level. Even more, each level has a hidden bandage to find and a time trial with a ranking system. Due to the short length of most of these levels, it's fun as hell to try and get the fastest time I can. The worlds also have these hidden portals that warp you to a series of 8-bit levels, many of which can help you unlock new characters (some of which are from other indie games!). And that's not even mentioning Super Meat World which, in the PC version, lets you play levels that other people have made. This game has so much to do, and while your mileage may vary on how much of it you want to complete, there's definitely a lot to keep you playing.

Presentation-wise, Super Meat Boy is definitely distinct. I think the crude art direction works really well for this game, but it's the detailed and pixelated levels that truly shine visually. Meat Boy is a genius character design and a clever way to have your character mark his track and where he died while sidestepping the issue of blood. However, the other characters are a bit more hit and miss, with characters like Dr Fetus and Brownie (who's literally just a piece of shit) bordering on gross-out humor which just absolutely does not appeal to me at all. The soundtrack on the other hand is absolutely amazing. Danny Baranowsky's iconic dark and sinister style fits Super Meat Boy pretty much perfectly, and the themes are an excellent blend of high-energy chiptune, rocking guitar, and tense melodies. I think the soundtrack dips a bit during the classical tunes near the end of the game, but those earlier tunes are so good, I can't really get too mad.

Overall, Super Meat Boy definitely deserves all of the praise it gets. It's a tough but fair (outside of those boss fights) platformer with great level design and controls, a ton of content, and a unique visual and musical style that helps it stand out even today.

4/5 Stars