The premise of this game should be familiar to anyone that has played a super-hero platformer before. As Super Meat Boy, you are on a quest to rescue Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus. If you’re noticing Super Meat Boy’s trademark tongue-in-cheek humor right off the bat, that is the intention. The creators wanted the titular character’s premise to be a combo of cutesy mascot and 1990s gross-out body humor. And they succeed marvelously at this task.
How to Download Super Meat Boy
You can download the game from Steam or Epic Games store. And if you’re a fan of fiendishly difficult platform games, have also a look at two other games: I Wanna Be the Guy and I Wanna be the Boshy. They are both free.
The Game Review
Platforming titles tend to be one way or the other. That is, they’re either cute whimsical fun-fests like the Super Mario Bros. series, with its gradually steepening difficulty curve, or they’re more of the Pitfall variety and offer a ridiculous amount of challenge right out of the gate.
To be sure, Mario games are often reworked by fans into even more intense versions of themselves called “Kaizo” (or “crazy” versions in Japanese), but what about an indie title that takes kaizo concepts and builds a whole property around them?
Then you get Super Meat Boy, the darling 2010 indie title from Team Meat that both pays homage to the Mario games of the past as well as other games like Rogue-likes and “extreme” platformers.
Unlike many console platforming games, Super Meat Boy is a long, long game – and difficult at that. With over 300 levels to traverse, the game emphasizes mastery of its mechanics and an absolutely bone-crushing level of difficulty that doesn’t let up.
Actually, the action is so intense that, even as a platforming game, it draws comparisons with other titles like Capcom’s Ghouls ‘N Ghosts or even LJN’s legendarily tough Silver Surfer for the NES.
Luckily for the player (and his sanity), Super Meat Boy has an unlimited number of lives. Further, you can play stages in a chapter in any order you like. When the title meets an untimely demise he starts the stage right back up from the beginning.
This often results in almost cartoonishly frustrating moments where players will send SMB to his death over and over again in a hellish version of Ground Hog Day.
Players can even collect bandage items hidden throughout the levels to unlock other characters. These other characters, as per the tradition established by Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA), each have different attributes. One can float in midair temporarily, for example. These other characters add a lot of replay value and even more challenge to the core gameplay.
Featuring music from Danny Baranowsky and an art direction from Edmund McMillen, the game is charming and superbly well polished, particularly for an indie title.
A fun romp through 300 stages that is more than guaranteed to challenge even the most seasoned gamer, Super Meat Boy nestles in alongside other platforming greats like Mario, Sonic, and Pitfall Harry quite well.
