Super Meat Boy
October 26, 2010
If you’ve been following the indie scene for any length of time now, there is a 1 in 1 chance you’ve heard of Super Meat Boy. Having been advertised in every medium possible using every possible humorous permutation of anything remotely meat-related, there’s a fair chance that you may have had to turn to the proverbial carrots and sprouts of the indie gaming world to get some relief. At any rate, it’s here, on XBOX Live Arcade at least, and I’m ready to bite down hard and lose some molars to it’s elasticated, bbq-sauce-stickied tendons.
“SUPAH MEAT BOY!”, blares a testostoriffic bro-voice over a sublimely placed single-chord butt-rock guitar symphony. The titular hero, an ambulatory slab of meat that possesses fantastic amounts of meatly vigour and vim and is high in heart-bathing cholesterol, appears confuzzled by the flashing cameras of the title screen, although quite how his media naievete is possible when SMB has been hyped to high heaven and back over the previous months is confuzzling in the scientific sense; unless, of course, the game deserves it’s reputation as the next big indie platformer since, say, Braid to justify its premature plaudits.
Thankfully, it’s thoroughly enjoyable, albeit in masochistia extremis. Controls draw on the rich, detailed platforming heritage of walk, run and jump, and are suitably hella tight as advertised. You’ll die – a lot – your reward upon finishing a level being an instant replay of all your ignominious deaths AT THE SAME TIME, creating a comical cavalcade of meat men dying in a myriad of ways. Wall-jumping features a lot, and I’m hard pressed to think of another platformer where it’s been implemented as well as this, and with regards to the often excellent level design, as ingeniously.
There’s over 300 levels… many of which are homages to past platforming genre giants. Warp Zones taper off from the main flow of the game, throwing you into a level set with art style throwbacks to GameBoy games, for example. Also unlockable are a host of playable indie gaming all stars with their own particular play styles. Super Meat Boy is aiming for the big time but conscious of its indie roots.
Did I mention you die a lot? Because you do. I’m going to repeat what I said on a comment thread somewhere: the game is a timed endorphin generator. Every time you successfully finish a level after many deaths, your brain gets a shot of endorphinous joy. There were involuntary fist pumps at times as well as ‘yesss’ hissed measurably through clenched, worn down teeth stubs. So it’s a bloodied scrawl of a love letter to the ancient gods of platforming and a distillation of its best elements and it makes you feel alternately frustrated and euphoric and is altogether very well done.
