Review by: Michael Barnes

I was just about to delete the demo for Super Meat Boy, the new retro-styled Xbox Live Arcade platformer when I decided to give it one more chance. I played through about fifteen or so of the demo’s thirty-odd levels and I didn’t really care for the game at all.

I’m 35, so I lived through the 8-bit era and played a lot of those vaunted, incredibly hard games like Ninja Gaiden and Super Ghouls and Ghosts when they were new and that design paradigm was all the rage. Frankly a lot of the so-called ‘retro’ games that have come into vogue lately with indie game designers have failed to impress me because they really miss the mark in terms of genuine nostalgia. I thought Braid was pretentious twaddle and for me, Limbo was a fancy lighting novelty disguising mechanics cribbed from games I played twenty years ago. Super Meat Boy seemed to be another attempt to get back to the basics of 2D platforming gameplay: running, jumping, and dying an awful lot with its gimmick being the gross-out Garbage Pail Kids-level humor of an anthropomorphic cube of bloody meat sliding down a wall.

But something clicked while I was working my way through the remainder of the demo, I looked beyond the off-putting tone and characters and I realized that Super Meat Boy wasn’t pretentious, precious, or really even all that retro. More than that, there’s a damn good platform game here, and one that feels current and fresh. It’s far too refined and too tightly designed around a core mechanical simplicity to be lumped in with the rest of the nostalgia games that rely on gimmicks and quirkiness to get by. It is a game characterized by an awareness of practically everything that has worked well in 2D platformers since Donkey Kong and its studied precision demonstrates that it couldn’t have existed in 1985, 1995, or even 2005.

With its soundtrack and intentionally archaic graphics, it’s atavistic and minimalist to be sure, but to call it “retro” forecloses on its very here-and-now postmodernism. This revelation led me to buy the full version, and now I’m hooked into this endless cycle of death and rebirth as played out by a grotesque cast of characters straight out of a stoner’s imagination.

The “whatever” storyline finds Super Meat Boy trying to rescue his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the evil Dr. Fetus. And of course, when he navigates one of the 350+ levels to get to her, Dr. Fetus shows up and spirits her off to another area. Getting to Bandage Girl can be extremely difficult as there are a variety of one-hit kill hazards such as spikes, saw blades, mountains of discarded syringes, piles of salt, cannons, and more. There are no hit points, there are no shiny ledges to show you where to jump and there are no Uncharted-style canned platforming sequences. It is quite old school in this regard and a significantly old-fashioned component of the gameplay is the discovery of the right ways to complete each level through trial, error, and practice. Each death is either a lesson learned or a mistake on the part of the player- the game is totally, ruthlessly fair.

And each death is recorded, because when you finish a level the game shows you every attempt you made- all at once. It’s a neat feature and it’s fun to watch thirty or so Super Meat Boys rushing to their death as one squeaks through for the win. It’s strangely rewarding in a way that many modern games, with their handholding and gentle difficulty curves, are not. So yes, this game is as hard as you’ve likely heard and you will die many, many times. You will cuss, swear to never play the game again, and shut it off in disgust to play something else. Fortunately, the game does throw you a bone—each world requires a certain number of its levels to be completed before you can take on its boss, but you never have to beat all the levels unless you’re a true Super Meat Boy champion (or obsessive).