After 10 long years Super Meat Boy is back, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels a lot of the original, except for what I loved the most: snappy controls and tight platforming. In the year of Spelunky 2 and HadesIt’s a disappointment to see Meat Boy return without the main aspects that made it great.
Super Meat Boy Forever used to be originally announced in 2014 like a mobile game. Then one half of indie duo Team Meat, Edmund McMillen, left to focus on other projects, allowing co-creator Tommy Refenes to reboot the project itself for consoles in 2017. Other developers were eventually recruited, the new Team Meat announced a release date in early 2019, and almost two years later it’s finally here.
Released last week as a timed exclusive to Epic Games Store and Switch – the game will eventually make it to other platforms –Super Meat Boy Forever Forces your smiling bloodstrap to run forward at a constant clip as you crouch, jump and work your way through procedurally generated enemies and obstacles. Instead of the tightly wound death dungeons in the first game, ForeverThe levels are more expansive, side-scrolling affairs full of randomized hazards that lock each time you generate a new game world. None of these elements are bad on their own, but they don’t really come together to make an arcade platformer that I’m looking forward to coming back to.
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Usually that’s because of how the game controls. Being burdened with constant momentum feels at odds with the free-bouncing flow of 2010 Super Meat Boy excelled in. You can change direction by jumping walls or running up slopes, but for the most part Forever is about decoding the exact combination of jumps, punches and slides off the wall to get through a certain barrage of circular saws and then execute them to get Meat Boy to safety, as if piloting a meaty missile ship at a distance . There is a disconnect between solving puzzles and actually executing the solution that just made me cold.
It doesn’t help with that Super Meat Boy Forever feels mostly fuzzy, exacerbated by occasional delays when lots of things are going on. I’ve had frame rate issues when playing on my Asus Zenbook, which seems to be isolated some silliness around certain PC settings. I haven’t played the game on Switch but there it is locked at 1080p at 60fps and seems to work fine based on GameXplaintime with the game.
Forever has one bright spot: his boss fights. Rather than always being propelled forward, Boss Stages provide you with plenty of tools to navigate a limited area and explore the constructs of the villainous Dr. Defeat Fetus by maneuvering back and forth to hit weak spots. These encounters are smartly designed and fun to find out, even when dozens of people were killed. It was also the times when the brilliance of the original game was most evident.
The original Super Meat Boy was part of a new wave of indie homages to genre classics. Two years before, Spelunky came out. Supergiant Games was released in 2011 Bastion. This year they’ve seen all three direct sequels, or spiritual successors, with Hades building on and yet far exceeding the foundation laid Bastion. In this context, Super Meat Boy Forever feels particularly disappointing, not even offering more of the same of a cherished classic, but instead a strangely compromised spin-off whose auto-runner’s conceit feels stifling without bringing anything exceptionally new or valuable to the table. It’s hardly a horrible game, and it’s still packed with cutscenes that create a breezy new chapter in the Meat boy-fresh. But it is still a bummer.