In the transition to fully three-dimensional worlds, Super Meat Boy 3D does a phenomenal job at retaining the blistering challenge of the pioneering original. While nearly everything is retained in the dimensional shift, a few unique issues do hold it back.
Super Meat Boy is a permanent fixture in my gaming lexicon. As far as titles I’ve referenced in reviews go, Team Meat’s brutal platformer is one of the top contenders.
Praise is easily showered on the game because of its massive impact on the indie scene. After all, it was featured in a movie focused on the subject. But Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes’ game is simply a classic. There was something electric about Super Meat Boy and the way it captured the essence of platforming. Brimming with references, humor, and challenges that respected the player, it stands as one of the best games I’m sure many of us have ever played.
Imitating a game like Super Mario Bros. is easy. A few notable challenges peppered into a colorful world with responsive controls gets a massive amount of mileage. Test players’ responsiveness just enough as they move from left to right and you’ve summed up entire console generations of games. What’s harder is taking that formula and crafting the familiar into something uniquely fantastic. I’ll never forget the time I played Meat Boy on Newgrounds, or many of the other incredible Flash games that determined developers made for free. And I’ll never forget how Super Meat Boy felt like almost every platformer I’d ever touched, while still being completely fresh.
When games moved into the 3D realm, I’m not sure how many of us were truly ready. And, of course, Nintendo nailed it right out of the gate with Super Mario 64. Suddenly, we could control the camera. Suddenly, the playable space was an open field, not a singular plane of being. For as blocky and polygonal as that game was, it captured what made Mario gaming’s eternal mascot.
Super Meat Boy is an homage to gaming, it is an expression of love for the thrill and joy games can bring–regardless of how difficult its challenge is. As a lifelong gamer, I can play Super Meat Boy and feel inspired to play a dozen other games–Donkey Kong Country, Dynamite Headdy, Battletoads, Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose, Hotline Miami, Earthworm Jim, Rayman Origins.
Super Meat Boy 3D is built off the back of its predecessor and though I was surprised when it was revealed, its existence absolutely makes sense. Why wouldn’t the current iteration of Team Meat attempt to capture the same magic, just like Nintendo did?
If you want the easy sell for Super Meat Boy 3D: it’s everything you remember about Super Meat Boy… in 3D. It’s all in the name. And honestly, there isn’t a lot of granularity from there. The game succinctly translates and evokes much of the same sentiment as the 2010 platformer.
Meat Boy is a boy covered in meat. He’s trying to rescue Bandage Girl from the clutches of Dr. Fetus. Every stage, Meat Boy races through hazards, pitfalls, and certain death to the end point where Bandage Girl is, only to be walloped away by Dr. Fetus. At the end of every world, a boss fight acts as a roadblock.
However, nearly every stage in Super Meat Boy 3D is a grueling gauntlet of hard-to-avoid obstacles, perilous jumps, and expert timing. The one balm to each of these scathing challenges is that most stages take less than 30 seconds to complete. Death is a splatter of bloodied meat but it’s instant and the player is sent right back into the action to try again.
The brilliance of the Super Meat Boy formula is that stages are constructed in a way that if the player nails their timing and jumps, they can more or less go from start to finish without stopping. Hesitation is frequently punished as the player often disrupts the flow of the stage. A rotating saw will be in just the wrong spot. A spiked platform will slam on a wall too early. Or a laser will blink into existence and slice up Meat Boy.
Deep into the third world I was put up against a series of conveyor belts that were shipping scalding hot metal cubes. Touch the cubes and die. But the cubes were also blocking the paths of lasers, so I needed to time my movement to sync up. Yet I kept dying over and over again because I couldn’t get the timing right. Quickly, as I had realized multiple times before, pausing was death. If I ran at top speed and found a way to jump around the first set of deadly cubes and wall jump onto the next row of conveyor belts, I could air dash between the middle two lasers that had temporarily disappeared, hop over the next set of lasers, and bounce right to Bandage Girl.
It just took a couple dozen tries.
The thrilling challenge of Super Meat Boy 3D is that its platforming often feels like solving a puzzle. A death isn’t really that frustrating, more of an “oops” moment that may make the player chuckle as they spawn right back in. The player begins to learn when to jump, where safety is, and how to survive. A number of stages can be survived on first try just because the player is lucky enough to have their wits about them. Other stages can have enduring difficulty, especially for those seeking out collectible bandages and the A+ times that leave virtually no room for mistakes.
As the game continues, the challenges evolve. Saws and meat grinders that are mostly static to a platform or zone are swapped for missile launchers that hone in on Meat Boy’s location. Walls to cling to and jump from now have spiked balls shot alongside them. Over the dozens of stages, each one was striking in its ability to act as a distinct challenge, showing Team Meat’s brilliance for their craft.
Difficulty is often a barrier for entry and Super Meat Boy 3D has no qualms about its razor-sharp design. This is a game meant to test the player’s skill for timing and raw platforming intellect. A wealth of content carried over from the original game returns to further extract players’ time and potential sanity, all circling back to how pitch-perfect the game and its concept are. Bandages can be found to unlock bonus characters that control a bit differently for memes or actual movement boons. Getting an A+ time on a stage unlocks its “Dark World” variant that houses a similar structure, albeit it with an amplified challenge usually in the form of more hazards and ways to die. Secret zones unlock that pay homage to the early days of 3D gaming that obviously inspired Team Meat and Super Meat Boy 3D.
As a whole, Super Meat Boy 3D is an impressively pungent game that puts players to task. Its colorful worlds and catchy tunes eschew the deadly truth about how painful it will actually be. And the transition to three dimensions has also provided some fun advantages that Team Meat implements. Continued death will show visible signs of damage and dismemberment on Meat Boy and the other characters. A splattered trail of juice will mark up stages, indicating frequent points of impact that can also act like visual aids for players of where they should and shouldn’t hope to land. Post-victory replays are still patently hilarious showing the path to eventual success and the sheer number of Meat Boy corpses that lie in a stage’s wake.
Playing Super Meat Boy 3D felt cozy, honestly. It was like welcoming back a familiar friend after 16 years away, they just simply look different. And while that shift is quite effective and strikingly retains the original feel, there are a handful of things that do get lost in the move.
As a taut 2D platformer, Super Meat Boy relied on expert precision to constantly nail jumps that felt impossible. But players only had to consider the playable area on a flat, two-dimensional surface. In 3D, the game loses some of its precision. Team Meat ensured that controlling Meat Boy has a degree of floatiness in addition to his ability to gain velocity. In Super Meat Boy 3D, players are able to wall run to move deeper into the background or chain jumps between walls and platforms. Meat Boy can also perform an air dash to break through some barriers, maintain speed, or potentially shave off milliseconds by bypassing an obstacle.
Yet the three-dimensional nature of every stage means that depth is not always easy to judge when trying to make a landing. Often I would overshoot a landing or run into a blade because I jumped off a conveyor belt as it moved forward. A red circle appears on solid ground directly under Meat Boy to indicate where he will drop to. Though players have a lot of in-air control, it wasn’t always as accurate as I would like it to be. And sometimes, the camera angles simply make it hard to judge the action. A gap requiring the player to dash between two closely rotating grinders killed me a lot because I felt like I couldn’t judge spacing due to the camera being higher up than I would have desired. At times, it feels like the player is doing brief guess work in the initial push through stages to understand where they should be going and what they can land on.
Considering the pinpoint accuracy often required by Super Meat Boy, Super Meat Boy 3D simply can’t match those standards due to the nature of its fundamental design. Of course, players are meant to master these stages if they so choose and slightly imprecise jumping and undesirable cameras won’t even matter after a few dozen deaths have honed muscle memory. The same logic applies to the handful of challenging bosses, which require a balancing act of careful timing and memorization of when death awaits. But because Super Meat Boy 3D packs its challenges so tightly in these easily digestible stages, it’s hard to complain too much.
Super Meat Boy 3D is a thrillingly apt interpretation of the original Super Meat Boy. Those who loved Meat Boy’s squelching, sticky jumps in 2D would be hard-pressed not to fall in love with the same brutal execution in 3D. While some precision and legibility gets lost in translation to varying degrees of success, the wealth of content and homage is retained. Team Meat’s reverence for the genre is unmatched and I can’t wait to keep exploding in a hail of meat for years to come.
