After 10 long years super meat boy is back, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels much of the original, except for what I loved most: snappy controls and tight platform. In the year of Speleology 2 and HadesIt’s a disappointment to see Meat Boy return without the key aspects that made it great.
Super meat boy forever was originally announced in 2014 as a mobile game. Then half of the indie duo left Team Meat, Edmund McMillen, to focus on other projects, and had co-creator Tommy Refenes restart the project himself for consoles in 2017. Other developers were finally recruited, the new Team Meat announced on release date in early 2019, and almost two years later the time has finally come.
The game was released last week exclusively for the Epic Games Store and Switch – the game will come to other platforms at some point –Super meat boy forever Forces your smiling blood patty to run forward with a constant clip as you crouch, jump, and slash your way through procedurally generated enemies and obstacles. Instead of the tightly wounded death dungeon in the first game ForeverThe levels are sprawling, side-scrolling affairs full of random dangers that lock in every time you generate a new game world. Neither of these elements are bad on their own, but they don’t really come together to create an arcade platformer that I want to return to.
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Mostly it’s because of how the game controls. To be burdened with a constant dynamic is in contradiction to the free jumping Flow 2010 super meat boy excellent at. You can change direction by jumping off walls or walking on ramps, but for the most part Forever It’s all about decoding the exact combination of jumps, punches, and wall-sliding to get through a specific barrage of circular saws, and then executing them to get Meat Boy to safety, like remote controlling a meaty missile ship. There’s a separation between solving puzzles and actually carrying out the solution that just left me cold.
That does not help Super meat boy forever feels especially floating, which is made worse by occasional slowdowns when busy. I was having frame rate issues on my Asus Zenbook which appears to be isolated some wonkiness about certain pc settings. I haven’t played the game on Switch yet, but there it is locked to 1080p at 60 fps and appears to be running fine based on GameXplainTime with the game.
Forever has a bright spot: his boss is fighting. Instead of always being propelled forward, boss levels give you enough tools to navigate a limited area and use the devices of villain Dr. Eliminate fetus by maneuvering back and forth to meet weak spots. These encounters are cleverly designed and fun, even if the result is dozens of deaths. They were also the moments when the brilliance of the original game was most noticeable.
The original super meat boy was part of a new wave of indie tributes to genre classics. Two years earlier Cave explorers came out. In 2011 Supergiant Games were released bastion. This year all three have seen direct sequels, or spiritual successors, with Hades build up and yet go far beyond the laid foundation bastion. In this context, Super meat boy forever feels particularly disappointing, offering not only more of a cherished classic, but also an oddly compromised spin-off whose auto-runner conceit feels suffocating without bringing anything out of the ordinary new or valuable to the table. It’s hardly a terrible game, and there are still plenty of cutscenes that tell an airy new chapter in the story Meat boy-Verse. But it’s still a bummer.
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