YMMV / Mario's Mystery Meat

• Awesome Music: The music choices for this game are generally quite good, including tunes from Undertale, EarthBound, U.N. Squadron and even some custom music! You can listen to the whole soundtrack here.
  • "Jesus Sent Me" plays for about 10 seconds in a cutscene that lasts just as long. However, it's a complete piece that's a full rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", and the Super Mario World string ensemble suits it very well.
  • For an otherwise hard-as-hell level, Cursed Cathedral is a catchy and eerie melody for the final level of the game. Vinny even said that the music reminded him about Chrono Trigger.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Amongst the hack's Mind Screw and Shout-Out moments, one moment that particularly stands out as coming out of nowhere is the last moment of the hell segment, where Sponge is teleported to the middle of a structure shaped like deformed versions of Mario and Luigi and surrounded by meat worms that shoot fire and seemingly kill him, with the Mario's Early Years voiceover saying "you suck!", before he is shown to be alive in Chat City.
• Breather Level: After what the player goes through, the Chat village is much more relaxing and generally free of obstacles, but they can be thrown back into an obstacle-filled section if they accidentally eat certain villagers with Yoshi.
• Demonic Spiders: The upside-down final level is full of them. Besides the fact you're upside-down, almost all of the enemies are rather large, are immune to jumping, and hide within the level. The Ball and Chains only go a certain direction (which are most likely to screw you over because of how they're positioned), and some Slime Girls blend in with the bushes and drip down on you at the worst of times.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Despite only playing a minor role in the game in the grand scheme of things, the game's Anthropomorphic Personification of Twitch Chat became hugely popular, especially among Vinny's viewerbase (towards whom the hack was geared). In fact, the game's version of Chat caught on so well that the animation for them dancing was appropriated by Vinny as a BTTV Emote (with Eminus' blessing), and fanartists within the Vinesauce community have generally treated this take as definitive since the hack's release (after years of Chat's depictions Depending on the Artist).
• Moral Event Horizon: Meat crosses this when it kills Princess Bleach when she was waiting for Sponge to rescue her and instead of eating her right away, Meat waited for Sponge to see Bleach's corpse before it swallows her whole. Yeow.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Daksu's Closet is a section of Meat that's almost entirely red, and it has the basement theme from Silent Hill playing in the background. Making matters even worse is the section where you're chased by multiple Inyumes. Vinny himself felt Giygas vibes.
  • The section where Sponge is sent to hell runs heavily on Surreal Horror, putting together a variety of extremely weird and extremely horrifying scenery and situations that culminate in Sponge apparently dying. He actually survives and wakes up in Chat City, but it's still a highly unsettling experience nonetheless.
  • Chat City is generally a weird yet funny city, what with the random dialogue coming from the NPCs. However, if you feed a Yoshi a certain NPC, he'll proceed to vibe-check you and take you to a dark, twisted version of Chat City where the NPCs are malevolent and the sky is infested with bizarre monsters, referencing Vinny's corruption streams.
• Pop-Culture Isolation: Needless to say, the game is only really intended for play by people who are already fans of Vinesauce and have a comprehensive knowledge of numerous in-jokes both old and new surrounding Vinny and the general community. Greener fans and non-fans, meanwhile, are more likely to be left confused at the otherwise incoherent mish-mash of ideas, characters, and concepts. To give an idea of how far back some of the in-game jokes go, the first level is a reference to a corruption stream from 2018 that Vinny himself had forgotten about, one line in the "Mario and Luigi's Thoughts on CBT" section offhandedly references a gag that goes as far back as 2012, and the opening gag of the game references one of the earliest videos on Vinny's YouTube channel from 2010. Even the game's main protagonist and antagonist, Sponge and Meat, respectively, have a fair bit of history to them. This gets lampshaded by Vinny almost a year after his own playthrough of the game, where he talks about a German TV show that supposedly played it in utter confusion the whole time.
• Quirky Work: No, really, the amount of crazy stuff in this hack would make anybody assume this to be the case.
• Signature Scene:
  • The giant Meat rising from the ground at the end of the first level, to the point where it's a prominent part of the thumbnail for the official YouTube reupload of Vinny's stream of the hack.
  • The EarthBound-style battle against Mr. Dink due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change and the absurdity of it.
  • According to YouTube's "most replayed" function, the CBT interlude is one of the most, and in some cases the most, replayed scenes in both Vinny's stream and other playthroughs of the hack.
• Special Effect Failure: "Have at you!" in Dracula's infamous line was not fully cut out of the sound file, meaning you can still hear a bit of the H. Whether or not it adds to or detracts from the experience is up to the player, given the general tone of the game.
• Tear Jerker: While the hack is almost entirely a comedic, Mind Screw homage to Vinny and his streams, the "good" ending still manages to be this, with Sponge ending up victorious and escaping the meat worm, but with Princess Bleach being eaten in front of him and Dead All Along, possibly once again depending on how the hack stands on the rest of the canon. The credits end with Sponge lying on the ground with the moon behind him after his escape, making his victory a very bittersweet one.
• That One Level: The final stretch of levels in this hack are rather tough, with even Vinny and other people complaining that the hack was too difficult.
  • The Disney Acid Sequence Vaporwave area before vineRizon's Fortress has a range of difficulty issues, ranging from the awkward terrain (there are some sloped areas that could lead you to your death) to the strange enemies there — many of them being invulnerable to a simple jump. In fact, if you happen to jump on the clowns there, they'll multiply! Thankfully, Yoshi and your Tear attacks can kill them. The Bullet Bills will blindside you from being fired out from blasters that blend in with the terrain (and they explode in flames too), and a lot of enemies pop out of absolutely nowhere. There are also flying Rem Lezars that are impossible to kill unless you brought Yoshi to eat them — they can only be momentarily stunned when hit.
  • The following level itself isn't too bad initially, with most of the trouble coming from not being able to tell which direction the Thwomps shaped like vineRizon will be going, but the second half involves the level being hijacked by Will Smith. Everything will transform to be shaped like his face, and you constantly have to dodge a bunch of them as you go through a bunch of falling platforms. Then the you have to go up an area while lava's rising up, while dealing with blocks that get eaten off, with some of the later ones not even allowing you to get on them until most of them are eaten through anyways, giving you very little room for error.
  • Then there's the final level which follows, where you are upside-down 90% of the time. Besides trying to get adjusted to the controls, there's a ton of enemies that will fake you out because they appear out of absolutely nowhere, with most of them hiding in bushes and popping out from the ground. There's also a series of strange segments involving Meat Worms singing Hong Kong 97's theme, one of them even incorporating the reverse-gravity mechanic and requiring precise timing to progress.
• Unexpected Character: The photoshopped "Woll Smoth" meme version of Will Smith appears in the background tiling when Smith takes over, which is unexpected since Vinesauce isn't exactly known for that meme.

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