Reviews VideoGame / Meat Boy

super meat boy forever: what do you do when a game whose primary intention is to make money off of you actually plays well?

this is a review of super meat boy forever, not the first 2 games.

as meat boy's light smirk and eyes both genuine and empty pierce straight through your soul as though to convey a look of "help me, god, i've gone from a man to but a marketing machine," you come to realize everything about super meat boy forever implies it wants to eat money from the largest target audience possible. everything's been washed out and toned down; anything mildly gross or offensive is removed aside from doctor fetus and his signature middle finger, and any video game references that aren't to well-known classic video games are completely absent. there's also some very noticeable spots of creative bankruptcy here, like with the first two worlds having their concepts directly copy-pasted from super meat boy (despite tommy refenes, lead dev of this and super meat boy, bragging about how he didn't want to make a "sequel that's exactly the same"), and the ending is primarily an Unexplained Recovery for dr. f and then a lousy Sequel Hook that reveals near-to-nothing. for fuck's sake, tommy has even mentioned wanting to make a cartoon and an rpg based on the series. this is the first step of meat boy's transformation from a testimony to the indie platformer scene to a money-producing franchise.

and of course the autorunning mechanic is just as shallow and thoughtless— actually, no.

somehow the core gameplay is the one exception to the soullessness of this game. the central mechanic of "you can only ever run forward" is taken absolutely seriously and given a notable amount of thought and design, and it actually works. takes until either chapter 4 or the dark world levels to the difficulty to fully kick in, but averts the expected monotony pretty well and provides an actual challenge. if this game didn't have the marketability intentions it had from day 1, its plot and art didn't play it safe, and it featured actual indie game cameo characters (who aren't identical to every other character gameplay-wise - another odd decision made here with the playable characters), it could have kept its exact same gameplay and level design and succeeded, and the "but it started out as a mobile game and it's an autorunner so isn't it a sellout?" part would've resolved itself - hell, with all the resources poured into art this time around, it could've been an Even Better Sequel.

but that's not what we got. what we got is a money grab whose actual gameplay qualities are buried under its audacity to come off as cutesy and mainstream-friendly as possible, despite being based off a game where a fetus in a jar kidnaps a skinless man's girlfriend and they face off in hell. the gameplay, again, is surprisingly fine, and i'd recommend it based on that, but when everything else is borderline insulting, it's basically doomed to cult classichood (if even). i wouldn't blame anyone refusing to buy it for the condescending marketability aspect alone.

-gy