After 10 long years Super Meat Boy has returned, this time as an automatic runner in a sequel that channels much of the original, except for what I liked best: quick controls and tight platforms. The year of Spelunky 2 i Hades, it is a disappointment to see how Meat Boy returns without the key aspects that made him fantastic.
Super Meat Boy Forever era originally announced in 2014 as a mobile game. Then half of the independent Team Meat duo, Edmund McMillen, left to focus on other projects, leaving co-creator Tommy Refenes to restart the project himself for the 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 already here.
Last week it came out as a timed exclusive for Epic Games Store and Switch; the game will finally reach other platforms—Super Meat Boy Forever force your smiling blood pill to run forward with a steady clip as you tie, jump and hit yourself through procedurally generated enemies and obstacles. Instead of the severely wounded death dungeons from the first game, ForeverThe levels are more extensive, with side scrolls full of random dangers that get locked every time a new game world is generated. None of these elements are bad on their own, but they don’t really come together to create an arcade platformer that I feel like going back to.
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Especially because of how he controls the game. Being loaded with a steady momentum is at odds with the 2010 free-throw flow Super Meat Boy highlighted in. You can change direction by jumping off walls or running to ramps, but for the most part Forever it’s about decoding the exact combination of jumps, punches and wall sliding to get through a certain range of saws and then run them to guide Meat Boy to safety, as if remotely controlling a fleshy ship . There is a disconnect between solving the puzzle and realizing the solution that left me cold.
That doesn’t help Super Meat Boy Forever it feels especially floating, made worse by the occasional slowdowns when there are many things. I’ve had playback speed issues on my Asus Zenbook, which seems to be isolated some inconvenience on certain PC settings. I haven’t played the game on Switch, but there it’s locked at 1080p at 60 fps and it seems to work really well based on GameXplainit’s time to play.
Forever has a bright spot: his head struggles. Instead of always being propelled forward, the stages of the boss give you enough tools to navigate a confined area and shoot down Dr. Fetus’ weapons by maneuvering back and forth to reach weak points. These encounters are cleverly designed and are fun to discover, even when dozens of deaths accumulate in the process. There were also times when the brilliance of the original game was shown to the fullest.
The original Super Meat Boy was part of a new wave of independent tributes to genre classics. Two years before, Spelunky came out. In 2011 Supergiant Games was released Bastion. This year, all three have seen direct sequels or spiritual successors Hades building and far exceeding the established bases Bastion. In this context, Super Meat Boy Forever it feels especially disappointing, as it offers not even more of the same than a beautiful classic, but a strangely compromised derivation, whose presumption as an automatic runner feels suffocating without bringing anything exceptionally new or worthwhile. It’s barely a terrible game and is still full of theater scenes that tell a windy new chapter in the Meat Boy-versa. But it is still a nuisance.