Super Meat Boy is back baby! It’s been ten years since we first met Super Meat Boy and collectively fell in love with his meat juices. Super Meat Boy was all the talk in the indie community in it’s heyday and it lived up to the hype. It was an extremely hard platformer with a ton of guts and one I played for hours on end stoned in my room. Sorry mom.
Now Super Meat Boy is back again in Super Meat Boy Forever and this time he’s brought the family. That’s not the only big change however, because this time the levels have been procedurally-generated and Meat boy is set to auto-run for some reason. There’s now plenty of replayability but it’s a shame that you’ll never see the same level twice. That’s not to say the game isn’t fun (or really hard) it’s just a strange choice to make when the original worked so well.
There’s plenty more story this time around for those looking for more meat in their video games. There’s around an hour’s worth of beautiful cartoon cutscenes to help flesh out the story. Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, and their new baby, Nugget get entangled once again with Dr Fetus, leading these proud parents to punch and jump their way through seventy levels of intense platforming goodness.
Expect to die a lot. Where the first Super Meat Boy took a while to up the difficulty Super Meat Boy Forever wastes no time. I was dying right out the gate. Over the course of the 6 hour playthrough I barely managed to scrape by most levels. I was having my meat beat good. There’s no way in bloody hell I’m going to ever be able to ace any of these levels and collect all the goods, especially since they are never the same. It’s just too hard for a simp like me.
Controls have been overhauled here, again another change I’m not sure was necessary. You now just have two buttons to use. One for Jump/Punch and one for Slide/Dive. You’ll use your powers to overcome all kinds of nasty weapons like spikes, sawblades, knives, lasers and more. Each of these weapons will be sure to cut your meaty flesh at least once. You also don’t control your character, he controls you.
Two buttons should be easy enough to master but they aren’t. I found myself fumbling with the controls trying to make my way through each level. This game is really hard. Meatboy was made to be murdered over and over again. I’m honestly surprised my switch survived me playing this game, as not having a directional pad in handheld mode did not help make this game any easier.
Another new addition to the game is a series of incredibly hard boss battles. While very fun, they will leave you fuming. At the end of each world you must fight a boss that will push your patience to the limit. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I died in the hands of bosses. The difficulty is insane, and adrenaline junkies will get their fill of a good time here.
I really liked most aspects of the game, but I really don’t like the procedurally-generated nature of proceedings. I found because of this some sections of the game were way harder than they should be and a simple reset of the level fixed my problem. I would have much rather had levels I could get to know and come back to, especially when it came to ace them. This way I could never really get better as things were always changing.
Super Meat Boy Forever does one other thing that bothers me and that is it implements auto-run. How I wish I could switch to controlling my character myself. It can be incredibly frustrating at times and doesn’t help for exploration. It also aided in my death many of times, but thankfully the checkpoints are solid and load times are near instantaneous.
Those are my biggest complaints. Otherwise, Super Meat Boy Forever is quite good and it runs pretty well. There’re tons of characters to unlock and MEAT, which is cool and there’s plenty of secrets to find. Fans of the original and of absolutely brutal platformers will find lots to love here. It’s a great game that for me did a few to many changes for the worse. I really miss perfecting each level with the grace of a gold medal Olympian.
On a side note, I will give Super Meat Boy Forever an extra point for including a parody to Super Mario RPG. Enjoy that one!
