Video Game / Meat Boy

aka: Super Meat Boy

Meat Boy is a flesh- er, Flash game created by Edmund McMillen, Jonathan Mcentee, and Danny Baranowsky on October 10, 2008. Edmund and Danny then partnered with Tommy Refenes and formed Team Meat. Eventually Danny and Edmund's working relationship broke down, and Danny was replaced by the duo Ridiculon. Edmund himself had also left some time during development of Super Meat Boy Forever. Team Meat currently contains Tommy Refenes, Matthias Bossi & Jon Evans (Ridiculon), Kyle Pulver (designer of Offspring Fling! and Depict1), and Temmie Chang (artist of Undertale).

Meat Boy is a game about pain. It is a game about understanding pain in its purest, most unadulterated form, forcing you to go into a fit of madness. It's also an affectionate callback to all of the controller destroyingly difficult games of the late eighties and early nineties, and all of the clichés that go along with them, but at least here the levels are (usually) short and the lives (usually) infinite.

You play as Meat Boy, a skinless boy, trying to save his girlfriend made of gauze, Bandage Girl, from the clutches of Dr. Fetus, a nefarious fetus being in a jar that may or may not have a PhD. It's not exactly the most original plot ever conceived, but the game's still very imaginative. And painful, as Meat Boy must traverse though worlds filled with buzzsaws, syringes, lava, buzzsaws, salt, homing missiles, and buzzsaws. Did we mention buzzsaws? Cause, yeah, there's a lot of them. We mentioned pain too, right?

A map pack was later released on December 8, 2008. A sequel, Super Meat Boy, was released on Xbox Live Arcade and PC in Fall and Winter of 2010, then later ported to the PS4, Playstation Vita and Wii U. A WiiWare port was planned as well, but it was later cancelled as Nintendo's 40 MB limit for WiiWare games was much too small for the developers to work with. The game follows the same story as the flash game, where your goal is to save the girl, except there are a lot more levels including warp zones and obstacles to face, more polished gameplay, and more of a story going on. The game reached major popularity and critical acclaim among gamers, receiving strong sales and even winning some awards.

A third game for PC and Nintendo Switch, Super Meat Boy Forever, was released on December 23, 2020, where instead of playing as Meat Boy trying to save Bandage Girl, you instead play as either Meat Boy or Bandage Girl trying to save their baby daughter Nugget who has been kidnapped by Dr. Fetus, who also makes a return as the Big Bad. The sequel is different from its predecessor, as the gameplay now has an autorun mechanic similar to BIT.TRIP and Canabalt, but giving you the ability to turn around by walljumping. The sequel also introduces new enemies, hazards, and gameplay mechanics such as punching and dashing. The animation is also vastly different, dropping the Stylistic Suck of the original games and going for a more cartoonish, fluid style of animation. A Tabletop Game called Super Meat Boy Forever: Rival Rush was also released in 2018 as a tie-in. Naturally, the switch to autorunner meant a drop in difficulty as the game appealed to casu- wait, what? It's still kicking ass? And in this genre? Yep, you're not getting a break from the pain.

Meat Boy also appears in the BIT.TRIP series as a member of Commander Video's Five-Man Band. In return, Commander Video appears in Super Meat Boy as an unlockable character. Meat Boy and Dr. Fetus (as well as Bandage Girl in the remake) are also featured in The Binding of Isaac as unlockable items, while C.H.A.D shows up as a boss with a matching item drop. Meat Boy has also made cameo appearances in plenty of other games.

Compare I Wanna Be the Guy, Syobon Action, and Kaizo Mario World, which are difficult through sheer unfairness, rather than Meat Boy's brutal, but fair design. Also compare 1001 Spikes.

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The Meat Boy franchise contain examples of:

All Games

• 100% Completion: The games usually keep track of collected bandages and completed levels. To get to 100% (and above), all the bandages need to be collected, along with all the levels being completed.
• Auto-Scrolling Level: The original has some of them. Super Meat Boy tends to substitute various forms of Advancing Wall of Doom.
• Big Bad: Dr. Fetus.
• Bottomless Pit: There are several per chapter, but the three other boundaries will also do.
• Brainy Baby: Dr. Fetus.
• Butt-Monkey: Both Meat Boy and Bandage Girl get abused quite badly.
  • Dr. Fetus gets this too, especially given the intro. "Nobody likes Dr. Fetus, and that's why Dr. Fetus hates you!"
  • Effectively, every single character that appears in a cutscene is one of these. Especially the tragic squirrel, who is the lone survivor of the forest fire, is attacked by a rogue flying buzzsaw, is vaporized by a nuclear explosion, and STILL manages to come back at the ending cutscene, totally beaten up. Most bosses are also killed off in a rather dark-humored way. They all have a happy ending in the final cutscene though.
• Cast of Snowflakes: All the bonus characters are taken from Indie Games, usually using the original art style, making each one look completely unique and out of place. For example, all versions of Super Meat Boy have a boy in a cape, a girl in gimp gear, a color-changing stick, an 8-bit rainbow trailing guy, and a thing that looks suspiciously like Meat Boy, along with many exclusives to different versions of the game.
• Cephalothorax: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl.
• Character Select Forcing: Some bandages can only be obtained with certain characters.
• Collision Damage: Although justified in some of the cases.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Which is a good thing, given that the game is already plenty hard without having to consider how close you can get to the lava/fire without burning.
• Creator Thumbprint: It's not Edmund's first or last game which features a character in a developmental stage of a life cycle.
• Death by Irony: Both games end with Bandage Girl, who had been kidnapped and punched repeatedly by Dr. Fetus throughout the game, stomping Dr. Fetus to death.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Usually. Unless counting some of the Warp Zones in Super Meat Boy.
• Determinator: Meat Boy, who gets abused quite badly but still keeps trying to rescue Bandage Girl.
  • Anyone who manages to unlock The Kid.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Sort of parodied. Doctor Fetus regularly brags with pirating copies of Super Meat Boy in his in-character Twitter account.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Flywrench. It takes a while to get used to its controls due to being very heavy and unruly. However, it can do a triple jump and scale up walls without having to jump off them which will become very handy in some of the levels.
  • Naija is another of those characters who seems to be difficult to control at first, but becomes useful when practiced with.
• Distressed Damsel: Bandage Girl. Meat Boy is a Distressed Dude in the Harder Than Hard Bonus Level where their roles are flipped.
• Eternal Engine: The Factory.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Okay, here we go... as of Super, we have mutants, buzzsaws, giant flies, fetuses, salt, maggots, clones, monster missiles, and so much more.
• Excrement Statement: Dr. Fetus does this at the end of the original flash game. Eww...
• Fetus Terrible: Dr. Fetus.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Chapter 4. It's also where Meat Boy's spent lives end up.
• Flipping the Bird:
  • Dr. Fetus is quite fond of flipping people off. So much so, that his biometric hand scanner in Forever is programmed to read his middle finger pressed against the screen.
  • In Super Meat Boy Forever, Nugget learns of this gesture from Dr. Fetus and proceeds to flip off some butterflies. Meat Boy is not amused, though Bandage Girl laughs at the sight of it.
• Green Hill Zone: The Forest.
• Grotesque Cute: Especially in Super Meat Boy.
• Heart Symbol: Present in a few cutscenes.
• High-Class Glass: Dr. Fetus has a monocle on his jar.
• 100% Completion: Necessary for the Golden God achievement.
• Immortality:
  • According to the Hell, The End, & Cotton Alley chapters, besides Meat Boy, everyone in the MB universe is immortal. An entire universe... Unable to die permanently...
  • Meat Boy is a combination of Resurrective Immortality and The Undead.
• Joke Character: Tofu Boy, a Take That! to a Meat Boy parody by PETA. He's the slowest character in the game, with no special abilities, and he can't jump to save his life.
  • He can just barely beat the first two levels. And out of the 200 levels where Tofu Boy's playable, only around a fifth of them are beatable with him.
  • Forever makes him even sadder. In addition to being slower, his maximum jump height now decreases with every jump made (until he needs to stop and catch his breath), so it might take you a few minutes of strategically placing your jumps to realize when a level really is impossible with Tofu Boy.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: The Salt Factory.
• Level Editor: Meat Boy featured one. Super Meat Boy gets one for the PC version. A prototype devmode was accidentally left in the game which resulted the creation of user-generated content much earlier on.
• Lumber Mill Mayhem: The first level takes place in a forest area filled with saw blades that meat boy must dodge.
• Literary Allusion Title: The spinoff's Dr Fetus' Mean Meat Machine title is a reference to Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, from which it borrows gameplay elements.
• Malevolent Architecture: The mass amount of obstacles that you'll encounter makes each level a challenge to navigate through. Though while it's been confirmed that Dr. Fetus is the one who sets up the buzzsaws, that still doesn't explain the pits full of blood, lasers, and rocket launchers. The syringes in the Hospital stage are probably even stranger, as for some reason there are piles upon piles of them, and some are even stuck to the ceiling needle-down.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • The first game alone had Gish and a Castle Crasher.
  • The level pack contains N and some characters called "Alien Hominid" and "Pico".
  • Super Meat Boy takes it to extremes with many major indie games having a representative, including Jill, Steve?, Captain Viridian, Tim, Commander Video, Ogmo, Spelunky, RunMan, the Ninja, Alien Hominid and a Castle Crasher, Josef, Flywrench, Naija, and The Kid. To the surprise of everyone, there's also a Headcrab. Each of those characters has their own special abilities, be it a Double Jump, limited levitation or tunneling.^note Some of the characters only exist in either the Xbox 360 version or the PC version. Most PC-only characters have an Xbox equivalent, and vice versa.
• Meaningful Name: All the main characters.
• Megaton Punch:
  • Dr. Fetus sometimes likes to do this to Bandage Girl.
  • The boss of Hell, Little Horn, likes to do this.
• Minimalist Cast: In the flash game, there are no enemies (except for Black Maws in the Hell stage), and the only characters are Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, and Dr. Fetus. Starts to get averted in Super Meat Boy by adding enemies and boss characters, and Super Meat Boy Forever adds Nugget to the main cast.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Fetus.
• Nintendo Hard: And get used to Meat Boy's speed. Although those who think the game isn't hard enough, in Super Meat Boy, there is a more difficult counterpart to each level.
  • Cotton Alley. The Kid's levels. Dark World Rapture. Have fun, kids.
  • The Expert Remix chapter (which contains versions of main game levels that are even harder than the Dark World) means even more controller tossing.
  • The Kid's 2011 Christmas features four difficult levels (though one can be broken easily by turnstile hopping). The fifth however asks you to traverse the original Kid's level backwards.
• Nitro Boost: Conveyor belts in the factory.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Meat Boy leaves blood stains everywhere, and is the only man who can bleed days without dying.
• People Jars: Dr. Fetus is in one.
• Platform Hell: Surprisingly averted. You'd think a game this difficult would rely mostly on unfair level design, wouldn't you? Nope, the levels are almost entirely devoid of Fake Difficulty and, combined with the smooth controls, it means that you only have yourself to blame for each death.
• Powerpuff-Girl Hands: Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, Brownie, and Nugget have these, at least in-game in the former three's case. They are shown with fingers in more detailed art of them.
• Protagonist Title: Meat Boy is also the name of the protagonist.
• Reference Overdosed: Shout-Out count to other works is very high in Meat Boy series.
• Resurrective Immortality: Meat Boy is a One Hit Point Wonder, but reforms within one or two seconds, much to the frustration of Dr. Fetus. And not just during gameplay, during cutscenes too!
• Retraux
• Rule of Cool: The only reason why the game doesn't look as awesome as the cover.
• Rustproof Blood: And you'll be seeing a lot of it.
• Sadist Show: The cutscenes make it clear that suffering of characters makes up a lot of the humor in this game.
• Save the Princess: Meat Boy's plot motivation is to rescue the Bandage Girl from Dr. Fetus.
• Saw Blades of Death: Circular saws are probably the most iconic obstacle in the game. Some stay still, some move back and forth, some move around in circular fashion.
• Secret Character: Getting 100% Completion in the game unlocks Meat Ninja.
• Serial Escalation: Take a shot every time you think it can't get harder and are subsequently proven wrong. Continue until you're too wasted to play.
• Shout-Out: The game has a large amount of them, which is expected from an indie game.
  • The Flash game opens with Dr. Fetus stealing Bandaid Girl ala Ghosts 'n Goblins. This is also present in Chapter 7 of Super Meat Boy, except Dr. Fetus captures Meat Boy instead.
  • Chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy is called Rapture, which is the same name of Chapter 5 of Gish (which takes place in church).
  • The message at the end of every Warp Zone level is a nod to different Mario games; NES-style levels are nods to the original Super Mario Bros. castle levels ("Thank you Meat Boy, but Bandage Girl is in another Warp Zone"), while Game Boy-style levels are nods to the boss levels of Super Mario Land (wherein "Daisy" would turn into a monster and run away).
    • Furthermore, the characters that say that Bandage Girl is in another Warp Zone are also shout outs; for example, the Ninja from Nikujin or Captain Viridian from VVVVVV.
  • When you successfully complete a level with a bandage collected, the message "Bandage get!" appears, referring to the Japanese version of Super Mario Sunshine.
  • One of the glitch worlds resembles an airship from Super Mario Bros. 3 — complete with fixed-speed sawblades simulating auto scrolling.
  • The sound when picking up a key (when not in a Warp Zone) is the same as from Atari's Gauntlet.
  • The levels Blood Mountain and Bladecatcher are references to the band Mastodon.
  • One of the pitch-black Dark World levels in Chapter 1 is named "I Am the Night".
  • Combined with Stealth Pun: Level 2-7, likely the first pitch-black level the player will encounter, is titled "The Sabbath".
  • A Donkey Kong-styled level in Chapter 4 is named "Wiebe", and in its Dark World counterpart is called "Billy Boy".
  • Level 6-4X, "Maze of Ith", is named after a Magic: The Gathering card.
  • Super Meat Boy begins each chapter with a re-enactment of the opening to a different game.
    • Chapter 1: The CPS1 editions of Street Fighter II (The World Warrior, Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting), with the fighters replaced with Dr. Fetus socking Bandage Girl in the face.
    • Chapter 2: Castlevania, with Meat Boy running to a castle's gates, complete with Dr. Fetus as the bat.
    • Chapter 3: Adventures of Lolo, with Dr. Fetus swooping Bandage Girl in the same way as the NES game.
    • Chapter 4: Ninja Gaiden, with Meat Boy and Dr. Fetus spoofing Jo Hayabusa's final duel.
    • Chapter 5: Mega Man 2, except Meat Boy looks beat up by the time the camera pans up to him on the building's roof.
    • Chapter 6: Pokémon Red and Blue, with Meat Boy as Gengar and Dr. Fetus as Nidorino/Jigglypuff (and he chucks Bandage Girl as an attack).
    • Chapter 7: Again, Ghosts 'n Goblins, with Dr. Fetus snatching Meat Boy away just like the Red Arremer takes Prin-Prin.
    • Chapter I (Xbox 360 only): Bubble Bobble, with Meat Boy and Bandage Girl floating in bubbles and similar "fantastic story" text to the NES version.
  • Super Meat Boy Forever continues the trend:
    • Chipper Grove: Meat Boy and family's picnic is an homage to the intro to Super Mario RPG, with Dr. Fetus standing in with Bowser, and even a large "HELP!" speech bubble.
    • The Clinic: Rocket Knight Adventures, complete with Dr. Fetus taking the place of Emperor Devligus Devotindos.
    • Tetanusville: Contra III: The Alien Wars, with the shot of a town getting blown up, and almost identical dialogue.
    • The Lab: Spoofs the title screen of Super Metroid, with Meat Boy in a glass chamber and similar text.
    • The Other Side: Chrono Trigger, with Meat Boy and Bandage Girl ending up in an area parodying the End of Time, complete with soundalike music and Brownie standing in for the old man.
    • 0xdeadbeef: The Kirby drawing intro from Kirby's Adventure is repeatedly spoofed with the different characters, complete with Game Boy starting sound.
• Slapstick: Dr. Fetus's abuse of Bandage Girl is always played for laughs, except to Meat Boy. But just think, if the genders were reversed, it would be treated... exactly the same, actually.
• Spiritual Successor: To Super Mario Bros.. Both are platform games that take place in a colorful world and star a red protagonist trying to save his pink girlfriend from his arch-nemesis, although Meat Boy is much Darker and Edgier and more Nintendo Hard than the kid-friendly Mario games.
• Stylistic Suck: Joke Super Meat Boy for iPhone.
• Temporary Platform: Both the "crumbles on touch" and "timed" varieties appear.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Bandage Girl has a flower.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Meat Boy's reaction to the salt factory, in both games.
• Toothy Issue: Meat Boy has a very distinctive missing tooth.
• Troll: In-series example, as in Dr. Fetus' Twitter account.
• Unexplained Recovery: At the end of each game, Dr. Fetus dies or breaks his suit... and in the next game (or the epilogue, in Forever's case), he's just fine again.
• Villain Teleportation: Which is used to snatch Bandage Girl (most of the time).
• Wall Jump: One of your main techniques to victory.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Each time you get to Bandage Girl in the end of the level, she gets re-captured by the Big Bad.

Super Meat Boy

• After the End: Chapter 5 takes place in the Rapture, after a nuke is set off and kills all life.
• Abandoned Hospital: Chapter 2, aptly named the Hospital.
• Adorable Abomination: C.H.A.D.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: Lil' Slugger.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: At least a few times per world. They take the place of the autoscrolling levels in the original game. The "wall" may consist of saws, blood, salt, lava, maggots, or, in one of The Cotton Alley's stages, Pepto (It's a palette swap of the lava).
  • C.H.A.D. and Brownie have a rising death floor as hazards in their stages.
• Alien Sky: Cotton Alley has a bright pink sky, and some Dark World levels can have the sky an unconventional color.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: The new cover art for the PC release is a Shout-Out to over-the-top cover arts of video games from The '90s.
  • To top it off, the winner of the "Make a Russian Meat Boy cover so I don't have to" contest based their entry on a piece of World War II propoganda◊.
• Anthropomorphic Food: Tofu Boy, who is made of, well, tofu. There's also one April Fools Day prank Team Meat did that had Meat Boy be replaced by a Potato Boy. Averted with Meat Boy, who, despite what his name suggests, is actually a skinless person.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: Part of the core of the game:
  • The respawn after death literally take less than a second and is automatic.
  • The levels themselves are short, ranging from 15 seconds to 90 seconds, so in the quite likely event you die, you don't have to go through too much again.
  • For each main chapter, you only need to clear 17 of the 20 Light World levels to unlock the chapter's boss. This is averted in the The End's Light World, where all 5 levels must be beaten to access the Final Boss, but for its Dark World counterpart, you need to beat 85 of the 105 total Dark World levels, meaning you can skip that chapter's levels and go straight to the boss.
  • Various little side-quests when you get too frustrated with the main game, like beating past levels in record time, collecting bandages to unlock new playable characters, or playing through retro-styled "warp zones".
• Ascended Extra: According to Word of God, this picture◊ is Tofu Boy's first appearance. Since it predates the whole PETA debacle, Tofu Boy wasn't intended to be a total wimp when that was drawn.
• Alas, Poor Villain: In-Universe example. When Dr. Fetus is finally defeated, Meat Boy briefly feels sorry for him, but he quickly changes his mind.
• Alternate Reality Game: The Steam version is one of the 13 indie games that form the bulk of the material of Valve's "PotatoFoolsDay" Portal 2 ARG.
• And I Must Scream: Tofu Boy, all the time.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The ground in the chapter select screens has a face that changes based on the chapter.
• Art Shift: When going to the retro levels.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Steve and Meat Ninja, whom cannot be used to complete levels legitimately or earn achievements.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Brownie, who was supposed to attack you first, but when Dr. Fetus starts flooding the room with salt, you both start racing to escape it.
• "Before" and "After" Pictures: Credits has that one, although not in picture form.
• Bifauxnen: Jill.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Hospital.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Grubs in Chapter 5. Some are crawling along the surfaces while others have gathered in large piles. The Larries are even bigger.
• Black Comedy
• Blob Monster: Some of the enemies. From unlockable characters, Gish.
  • Giant Mook/King Mook: C.H.A.D.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Meat Ninja can "teleport" in the sense that he becomes briefly invincible if you press Shift right before moving into a hazard. If the hazard isn't small enough to get out of before his invincibility wears off, then you just die. And good luck with timing it right, anyways.
• Boring, but Practical: Meat Boy can only run and jump off a surface, while other characters have special abilities such as mid-air jumps, gliding, and sticking to walls. However, he is very fast and has excellent air control (especially when it comes to wall jumps), making him a valid choice for virtually any level.
• Boss Subtitles: Commander Video, Jill, Ogmo, Flywrench, and The Kid all get these. (Flywrench does it a bit differently — instead of a freezeframe and displaying his name and the game he's from, it's simply a black screen saying "Launch Flywrench.exe?")
• Bragging Rights Reward: The final Dark World level is appropriately named 'Brag Rights'.
  • Meat Ninja, who has the ability to teleport away from danger, is unlocked by getting 100% in the game. Of course, doing so proves that you don't exactly need it in the first place.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Some of the bonus levels.
  • The warp zone that unlocks The Kid being one of the most brutal set of levels ever put in a game. But what were you expecting from a Super Meat Boy / I Wanna Be the Guy crossover?
  • Beating the game unlocks an optional 7th chapter, Cotton Alley, which goes above and beyond in terms of difficulty.
• Bullet Time: CommanderVideo in his introduction video.
• The Cameo: Some non-playable characters make cameo appearances, like Darwinian from Darwinia or the boy from Limbo.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The game becomes clearly darker after the end of Chapter 4. The world gets nuked by Dr.Fetus, and Chapter 5 takes place in a destroyed and ruined city that filled with zombified Meat Boys and huge maggots. The music becomes more dramatic too.
  • However, subverted in Chapter 7, The Cotton Alley. Levels in this chapter have a pink and white theme, and an extremely upbeat and happy theme.
• Chainsaw Good: The first boss has it, along with regular buzzsaws of doom.
• Character Select Forcing: Boss levels, warp zones, "The End", and the Minus World levels disable characters other than Meat Boy. Likewise, you can only use Bandage Girl in Cotton Alley.
• Cheat Code: Required to play as Brownie, a Goo Ball (Steam version only), Tim, and Tofu Boy.
• Cherry Tapping: Tofu Boy is rather slow, can't jump very high or very far, has trouble climbing up walls and has no special ability whatsoever, which makes most levels effectively unbeatable with him. That didn't stop some people from speedrunning the levels he can (barely) finish.
• Chicken Walker: Lil' Slugger.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Jill, according to her description.
• Context-Sensitive Button: Dr. Fetus' single-buttoned Handy Remote Control is this, as it can do anything from summon a boss monster to turn on machinery to throw at Meat Boy to send him off a cliff.
• Cranial Eruption: The 4th boss gets two of these during the fight. Since he's made out of dead meat, they're rather blocky.
• Crapsack World / Crapsaccharine World: If you aren't dead, you're about to be, and everything kinda sucks while you're alive anyway. A squirrel can witness his whole family die, only to be killed by a random saw blade. He gets better, but only in time to be killed by a nuclear explosion to get a bit better again during the ending. Heck, even Dr. Fetus is only evil because everyone hates him! Also, most of the locations Meat Boy visits seem to be in ruins.
• Creator Cameo: Complete one of the minus worlds and you see the creators of the game make an appearance.
• Cross-Referenced Titles: Some levels in the Dark World have names referencing their counterparts in the Light World. For example, 1-13 is titled "Tommy's Cabin", while 1-13x is named "Tommy's Condo".
• Crutch Character: Commander Video, sort of. His float makes it easy to clear levels and get bandages in the first two chapters, but he's very slow and his jump is one of the lowest in the game. Many levels later on are impossible to clear with him due to his flaws. [However, it's possible to get some bandages easier in later levels.
• Credits Medley: The 2010 soundtrack uses a medley of the main menu theme and the light world themes for Chapters 1-5.
• Dark World: Each of the main levels except the boss battles (not including Chapter 6's boss) has a dark world counterpart. You don't know why the other ones are called light worlds until you play these.
• Deadly Dodging: A few times it has to be done. For an example, to allow turrets open up the passages. The fifth boss fight requires you to lure the boss to his death.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: Several levels have giant fans that can propel you through the air. Get too close to the blades, though, and SPLORCH!
• Death Course: Most levels are filled with deadly obstacles like sawblades or sawblade launchers.
• Death Is Cheap: At the end of chapters 4 and 6, it is revealed that infinite lives aren't just a gameplay mechanic.
• Debug Mode: Accessible by putting -devmode into the launch options. While in devmode, press F1 to access a primitive level editor.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Some of the levels (and the entire 6th chapter). Monochrome or dichrome levels are more frequent in Dark World.
• Disney Villain Death: Subverted — Dr. Fetus appears to have died after being defeated Super Mario Bros. style in the final boss level, but then he pulls off a Taking You with Me by activating a self-destruct. After Meat Boy and Bandage Girl escape, Dr. Fetus reappears and hits Bandage Girl over the head repeatedly. Then it's Double Subverted — He actually accomplishes nothing by hitting her, which he soon realizes and falls to the ground. Then he's stomped on. A lot.
• Distressed Dude: For Cotton Alley, the roles of Meat Boy and Bandage Girl are switched - Meat Boy is the one who's captured, and Bandage Girl is the one saving him.
• Disturbed Doves: As an homage to Canabalt.
• Ditto Fighter: Meat Boy clones in Chapter 5.
• Doppelgänger: Meat Boy has four and counting. And that's just playable characters. There's Brownie, who's a traditional Dark Reflection type doppelganger, Tofu Boy, pretender to the throne turned pathetic Joke Character and star of PETA's ill advised parody game, Meat Ninja, Meat Boy as a Future Badass from the year 20XX, and most recently, Potato Boy, an April Fools joke and Portal 2 tie in who's afraid of girls. Not to mention the fact every time Meat Boy dies, his former body lives on as a Meat Boy zombie as seen in Hell and Rapture, of which there are doubtlessly thousands. Then if that weren't enough, the Meat Boy zombies can merge together to form a colossal Meat Boy golem called "Little Horn", which serves as the game's fourth boss.
• Double Jump: Some of the unlockable characters can do this, and one can even triple jump.
• Downloadable Content: Super Meat World with 8 (!) new chapters. Available for free on Steam.
  • In the Xbox 360 version, there's an extra chapter called "Teh Internets" (unlocked by collecting 20 bandages) that has 5 sets of 20 levels.
• Easter Egg: Very rarely, upon completing a level with an A+, the beginning of the next level will be interrupted by an image of Meat Ninja, with a random message over his head and accompanied by a slightly unnerving jingle.
• Eldritch Abomination: Black Maws, black crocodile-like demons located in the Hell chapter that emerge from portals, shooting at Meat Boy and breaking into nine smaller heads.
• The End... Or Is It?: The complete ending shows that Bandage Girl is pregnant with an evil fetus. Dun dun duuuuuun!
• Energy Weapon: Present as an obstacle in the Hospital.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: If, for some reason, you don't like playing as Meat Boy and dripping a trail of blood everywhere, one of the first characters you can unlock is Commander Video from the BIT.TRIP series, who has an 8-bit rainbow trail.
• Evil Knockoff: Brownie, who is designed to look like Meat Boy, but instead of meat is made of Dr. Fetus' poop. The "evil" bit is subverted in that he doesn't actually try to kill Meat Boy, and he even pulls a Heroic Sacrifice for Meat Boy and Bandage Girl in the ending.
• Evil Overlooker: box art features Dr. Fetus as one.
• Eye Beams: These are fired by...
• Faceless Eye: ...that kind of turret.
• Floating Continent: The 6th and final chapter, "The End", takes place on one.
• From Bad to Worse: Chapter 5. Going to Hell was already bad enough, now the world has been wiped out and you end up in the Rapture.
• Fusion Dance: Little Horn is created from combined dead Meat Boy corpses.
• Future Badass: Meat Ninja.
• Gaia's Lament: The ultimate fate of Meat Boy's home after a nuclear explosion is set off in the closing cutscene of the Hell chapter. Fortunately, it seems to have grown back by the events of Super Meat Boy Forever.
• Game-Breaking Bug / Good Bad Bugs:
  • In one of the early levels, it's possible to get bandages over and over, resulting an incorrect percentage on the game completion. It also had a save file crash problem when it came out. The bugfix is still awaiting approval.
  • When the PC port came out, many players also had some serious bugs ranging from bosses not appearing to not being able to start the game at all. The development team started to fiercely fix the glitches so it got 9 batches of bug fixes within 9 days.
  • Unfortunately, the use of variable framerate physics makes the game so glitchy that it is unplayable on performance-challenged computers.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Little Horn.
• Green Boy Color: One secret level of takes place in a sepia Game Boy Color, with the signature Game Boy "ting!" before the level.
• Handy Remote Control: Dr. Fetus uses this quite frequently which does different things. Also parodied in one cutscene where Dr. Fetus pretends to be about to press it, only to throw it at Meat Boy.
• A Hell of a Time: The Meat Boys in Hell during the credits.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": The game's standard crash message is "The game has crashed. A mini-dump (heh heh) has been sent to the developers."
• Homing Projectile: A few of the turrets fire these. Although their homing abilities aren't the best, they make up for it with projectile speed.
  • Also, Dr. Fetus' bazooka. While its projectiles are slower and smaller, their homing abilities are much better.
• 100% Completion: Clearing every level and collecting all bandages nets the player the "Golden God" achievement.
  • Last Lousy Point/Guide Dang It!: Minus worlds add to your completion percentage in-game, but for achievement purposes do not count. Thus, you can have 105% and still not qualify.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt
• Interface Spoiler: Shows the number of chapters in the game. There is an extra chapter indeed after beating the first main 5 chapters + epilogue chapter.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: In the final chapter, named The End, only Meat Boy is playable.
• Iris Out: Heart-shaped variation during the ending.
• Irony: The Dark World to Cotton Alley has a brighter color scheme than its Light World.
• Kick the Dog: Meat Boy in the ending scene of Chapter 2.
• Large-Ham Announcer: The announcer.
  • SUUUPERRR MEAT BOY!
  • POOSH DA BUTTONS!
  • WAAAARP ZOOOOOOOOONE!
• Level in Reverse: A common theme among Dark World levels is to make you traverse the Light World counterpart backwards. With perhaps some extra buzzsaws thrown in.
• Light Is Not Good: Cotton Alley has a pink and white color scheme, and is the hardest chapter in the game.
• Long Song, Short Scene:
  • Downplayed with the 2010 Chapter 6 menu theme. The loop lasts around twenty-three seconds, while other menu loops only last around sixteen seconds... and Chapter 6 is the shortest chapter in the whole game, with only five normal levels per light/dark side and no warp zones.
  • The 2015 menu themes for chapters 1 through 6 apply as well. The level menus are fairly quick to navigate, and it usually takes less than ten seconds to decide what level to play once you're on the menu, yet the only theme that lasts under forty seconds is the Chapter 7 theme at thirteen seconds. You'll only hear the whole songs if you leave the game running in the background or if you're intentionally waiting it out to listen to them. If you like the music, though, it's worth the wait.
• The Many Deaths of You: Amusingly lampshaded whenever you finish a level; the instant replay includes not only the attempt where you completed the level, but also your failed attempts. All of them. Simultaneously. So if you died a lot, you'll see huge swarm of meatboys getting massacred in various ways before just one of them finally reaches the goal.
• Marathon Level: Chapter 6's final level, Omega is much longer than any other levels of this chapter.
• Meaningless Lives: Averted in the warp zones but played straight in the Minus Levels; since you only play one long stage at a time (as opposed to three in a warp zone), lives seem to serve no purpose other than to annoy the player with loading screens.
• Medium Blending: The creators wanted to give art shifts opposite of The Ren & Stimpy Show (where characters and everything else get extremely detailed in closeups) so in-game graphics, where everything is distant, are drawn more realistically, but menus and cutscenes are drawn in cartoon style. In-game characters, however, are drawn in a very pixellated style.
• Mercy Kill: In the end of World 2 cutscene, Meat Boy does this to the shrunken C.H.A.D. after badly injuring it by accident.
• Minus World: Deliberately used. Bandage Girl starts glitching sometimes when you replay levels in a chapter where you've beaten the boss. Reaching her when she's in this state unlocks that chapter's Minus World.
• Mood Dissonance: Cotton Alley. The background is pink (very bright in Dark World), a rabbit disco plays in the background, and the chapter contains some of the hardest levels in the game.
• Mood Whiplash: At the end of the first chapter.
• Multiple Endings: Two of them. One for Light World, and one for Dark World that expands upon the previous.
• No Indoor Voice: The announcer. Find a warp portal and get ready to hear WARRRRRRRRRP ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!
• Nonindicative Name:
  • For bosses, Lil' Slugger and Little Horn.
  • For song titles, there's Ballad of the Burning Squirrel, Betus Blues and Forest Funk, none of which actually belong to the said genre.
  • Cotton Alley. Enjoy your pink, colorful, cheery, sawblade-covered death.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: At first, Dr. Fetus seems like a comical Jerkass villain whose worst crime is rather slapstick abuse of Bandage Girl. Then, at the end of the first world, he burns down the forest the earlier levels took place in For the Evulz and chases Meat Boy down in a giant saw robot powered by the blood of innocent woodland creatures, and it gets worse from there.
• Oh, Crap!: Meat Boy's reaction when he has a bazooka in his face.
• Ominous Floating Castle: "The End" takes place in a castle in the sky, most likely Dr. Fetus' lair.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The theme of Dr. Fetus, the final boss. Fittingly, it is named Carmeaty Burana.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Undead meat (which is the boss of Chapter 4) and regular ones in found in Chapter 5.
• Parasol Parachute: Dr. Fetus uses one at the end of Chapter 2.
• Pink Means Feminine: Bandage Girl, and Cotton Alley, the bonus world you control her in.
• Planet Heck: Hell, obviously.
• Portal Network: There are momentum-based portals in Hell.
• Purposely Overpowered: Steve? from Minecraft can dig through walls and place blocks in midair to stand on, allowing him to completely skip most hazards. As such, you cannot earn achievements while playing as him. Also counts as Popularity Power as Minecraft is one of the most popular indie games out there.
• Red Ones Go Faster: Level 4x-3 is an all red version of its Light World counterpart, featuring a faster lava hazard and the level title 'Char'.
• Recycled Soundtrack: Ridiculon already made a replacement for Danny's "world intro" jingle in Ending 9 of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, so that same replacement was used in the 2015 soundtrack.
• Re-Release Soundtrack: Made for most console releases in 2015, and featuring Ridiculon (composer of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth's soundtrack), SCATTLE (composer of Hotline Miami's soundtrack), and Laura Shigihara (composer of Plants vs. Zombies's soundtrack). This came about when Danny Baranowsky refused to extend the license Team Meat had on his soundtrack for future usage, and its presence inevitably caused a Broken Base.
• Retraux: The warp zones and minus worlds feature four- and eight-bit graphics styles.
• Rise to the Challenge: C.H.A.D., Brownie and several non-boss levels too.
• Roar Before Beating: Some bosses. Parodied in the 5th boss where 3 caterpillars roar at the same time in choir.
• Sand Worm: The 5th boss.
• Schmuck Bait: Meta-example. McMillen deliberately tried to get PETA upset at the game, knowing PETA would get upset without knowing Meat Boy was not made of meat, just a boy without skin.
• Screen Shake: Present in sequence after the final boss and also in a few other levels like 1-19X.
• Secret Character: Brownie and Tofu Boy, who are completely hidden from the character select screen and require the player to input a button code. In the PC version of the game, Goo Ball and Tim also require a code, as they are replaced in the select screen by Headcrab and Naija respectively.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: At the end of Chapter 6.
• Sensory Abuse: A patched glitch on the PC version caused the game to automatically crank up the volume far higher than you can turn it normally.
• Sentry Gun: Rocket turrets and sawblade shooters being the most common.
• Sequence Breaking: A few levels have designs which can be exploited (some intentional, some not.) Most of them can be found in the fifth world.
  • In 3-11X, one of the harder Salt Factory stages, it's possible to jump between or above the advancing buzzsaws so you don't have to go all the way to the right to jump over saws.
  • The Kid and Flywrench can become handy in some of the later chapter levels due to fact that in some levels, they can often skip the portions of the level entirely. Runman can also come in handy in some levels as he's much faster and can jump much farther than the other characters.
  • In the final boss level the sawblades advancing in front of you can be jumped over for additional speed. Oddly, if you get to your destination before the blades in that level, you become mysteriously immune to them.
• Single Tear: Happens in the cutscene after beating the first boss.
• Smash to Black: Right before Brownie appears in the ending.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The Cotton Alley has the brightest, cheeriest music in the game, even in the Dark World. It is also home to the most fiendishly difficult levels in the entire game. The 2015 soundtrack takes it a step further, making the songs more laid-back in tone and sounding more like a lighthearted tune from a kid's game.
• Spikes of Doom: Although they're replaced by syringes, salt and so on in most of the levels, genuine ones appear in some of the warp zone levels. In the Hell and The End chapters, some very sharp spikes are encountered.
• Stealth Pun: A few.
  • Our hero is a skinless boy, who looks like a block of beef. Who frequently dies. Dead meat.
  • The character select screen is a Shout-Out to Super Mario Bros. 2, complete with the spotlight and curtains. The curtains are made of flesh as well. Meat curtains.
  • The main hazard of the Salt Factory is, of course, salt, which can kill Meat Boy like anything else. It's basically rubbing salt in the wound.
  • A common hazard is missile launchers that fire, well, missiles that home in on Meat Boy. They're meat seeking missiles!
• Sting: Enter chapter: Dun! Dun! DUNNN! It also happens during the good ending.
  • It's similar to the sting used in the Dramatic Chipmunk video.
• Stuck on Band-Aid Brand: Bandaid Girl is renamed Bandage Girl because of this.
• Sugar Apocalypse
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Fourth boss.
• Take That!: Super Tofu Boy is unlocked by typing 'petaphile' into the character select screen, to counter PETA's own Take That!.
  • It's also practically impossible to complete the majority of levels with him, since he can barely move or jump. You be the judge.
    • The best part? He controls almost exactly like he does in the PETA flash game. It's a Take That! at the programmers too.
• Teleport Spam: Meat Ninja's special ability, which is handy when dealing with projectiles and the like.
• Title Scream: SUUUUUUPER MEAT BOY!
• Toilet Humor: Brownie.
• Took a Level in Badass: Bandage Girl after Dr. Fetus kidnaps Meat Boy.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Little Horn, the fourth boss. The good news is that he has a set pattern; the bad news is that none of his attacks are telegraphed, so you'll have to figure out that pattern by dying a lot.
• Unexplained Recovery: Twice.
  • After falling from a building at the end of Chapter 3, Brownie shows up in the ending to save Meat Boy and Bandage Girl.
  • In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, C.H.A.D appears with plastic surgery, even though Meat Boy apparently smothers him after Chapter 2.
• Vent Physics: The double-edged blades of the game.
• Video-Game Lives: In some of the bonus stages.
• Visual Pun: The Sabbath level is completely "Black".
• Vorpal Pillow: Strongly implied Meat Boy does this to the shrunken C.H.A.D.
• WAAAAAAAAAAAARP ZOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!
• Weakened by the Light: The fight against C.H.A.D. requires you to climb to the top of the level and open up the roof to let in the sun. When exposed to the sunlight, C.H.A.D. shrinks and becomes harmless.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Salt, because Meat Boy has no skin.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Dr. Fetus finally shoots Meat Boy three times with a rocket launcher in the last level. He respawns three times, just like he does whenever he get shot, cut, or otherwise killed.
• When It Rains, It Pours: During one of the Dark World levels in the 5th chapter. The stage itself is even called "Downpour".
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: We get one of these during the credits. One of the squirrels is in a wheelchair and seriously injured, C.H.A.D. got plastic surgery and became a model, Brownie survived only to get crushed by a falling toilet, all the dead Meat Boys are partying in Hell, some baby Larries emerge from the dead ones, Bandage Girl is pregnant, and Dr. Fetus has regenerated.
• Wink "Ding!": Happens at the good ending. Although it's 8-bit.
• Would Hit a Girl: Dr. Fetus. Over and over and over.... Shoryuken, Megaton Punch, Spam Attack, and Spinning Piledriver are all acceptable to him.
  • To drive this home even further, in Cotton Alley, where you play as Bandage Girl and you have to save Meat Boy, whenever Dr. Fetus shows up to disrupt your reunion, he never beats Meat Boy up before abducting him.

Super Meat Boy Forever

• Abandoned Hospital/Big Boo's Haunt: The Clinic, which seems to borrow a lot from The Hospital, although this time it's supposed to be an abandoned insane asylum.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: The Other Side.
• Airborne Mook: As you now have an air dash, you will encounter flying enemies in the game.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: 0xDEADBEEF's five levels each corresponds to a previous world, while the sixth level is a glitchy mess that combines all previous worlds into one level.
• Anti-Climax: The cutscenes devote massive amounts of time to the woodland creatures taking over Big Slugger and preparing it for a revenge scheme. As soon as they actually catch up to Dr. Fetus, he pulls out a remote and activates its self-destruct.
• Art Evolution: The characters are a lot cuter (as a result of the animation upgrade), and Bandage Girl now has bandages across her body. Dr. Fetus also gets an updated design himself, gaining Floating Limbs and a more Dastardly Whiplash-esque look, with bushy eyebrows and a hunched back.
• Art Shift:
  • While its predecessor had choppy flash animation for its cutscenes and a retro style for its gameplay, this game instead has more fluid animation and a more colorful and cartoony art style in both the cutscenes and gameplay, not unlike something you would see from The Millennium Age of Animation or something like Angry Birds.
  • Rival Rush has a variety of artstyles in its cards due to being illustrated by several different artists.
• Artstyle Dissonance: The animation style and character designs are noticeably cutesier than the previous games making it come across as Lighter and Softer, however the game still has its share of scary and violent moments and Nintendo Hard levels.
• Bag of Kidnapping: Dr. Fetus puts Nugget in one of these as he kidnaps her.
• Battle Couple: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl become this as they set out on a quest to save their baby. Best exemplified by the final character, "Relationship Goals", which is both of them fighting as one.
• Big Bad: Dr. Fetus once again, but instead of kidnapping Bandage Girl, he kidnaps Meat Boy and Bandage Girl's daughter, Nugget.
• Bittersweet Ending: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl get Nugget back into their hands, the deaths of their new friends are undone through time travel, and they all help restore Chipper Grove to its original glory. But Nugget's attempt at reforming Dr. Fetus fails due to her parents punching him out at the wrong time, and although he's still grateful for her generosity, he remains an enemy to Meat Boy and is already working on his next scheme.
• Bowdlerize: The Nintendo version of the game's trailer censored Dr. Fetus' iconic middle finger, making him simply just raise his fist up.
  • An ad for Super Meat Boy Forever was also rejected from Facebook for showing Meat Boy and Bandage Girl's visible butts, to which Team Meat humorously responded.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Dr. Fetus flips off the narrator in the opening cutscene.
• Camera Abuse: Meat Boy flies and slams into the screen as a transition.
• Dash Attack: One of the new features in the game is that you can now perform a dashing punch in the air. This is a crucial ability as it allows you to attack Airborne Mooks and glide over large gaps.
• Developer's Foresight: The chunks are kept self-contained as much as possible. In the rare case that you get a key and move to the next chunk without having to use it (with some sort of skip or exploit), it actually falls over and fades away.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Literally during the Alpha Omega boss.
• Dissonant Serenity: Nugget never has any clue what's going on, nor any reason to feel remotely alarmed, providing quite the contrast to Dr. Fetus throwing her around and acting pissed all the time. It takes the destruction of time itself for her to begin crying.
• Endless Running Game: Though without the "endless" part. While the levels are finite, Meat Boy is always running unlike in the previous game.
• Evil Laugh: Dr. Fetus does this quite a bit in the game.
• The Face of the Sun/Weird Sun: Tetanus Tower has an angry sun akin to Super Mario Bros. 3.
• Foil: Nugget and Dr. Fetus serve as this to each other. Nugget represents the happiness and innocence of a baby, while Dr. Fetus represents hatred and evil all while harnessing the appearance of a fetus. Their drastic personalities make their interactions all the more interesting. Tommy Refenes put it best on Discord:
  Tommy: "Nugget is complete and total joy...Dr. Fetus is complete and total hate. Unstoppable force, immovable object. It's fun to write."
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The first glitched frame after Bandage Girl's scene in the 0xDEADBEEF opening cutscene (one of the only two glitch frames in that cutscene with pink in it) has the trans flag pattern stretched across the screen underneath her.
• Funny Background Event: As you're fighting the climactic Burly Brawl in Dr. Fetus's lab, against an entire swarm of clones of Dr. Fetus, Nugget can be seen happily watching videos on her tablet and drinking grape soda.
• Giant Hands of Doom: The Final Boss sees you battling a gigantic cosmic entity...or rather, its hands.
• Green Hill Zone: Initially a literal example. The first chapter used to be titled "Green Hills", although it was changed to "Chipper Grove" in the finalized version.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Almost. Bandage Girl and Meat Boy struggle to lift up a giant rock trying to save Nugget, and Bandage Girl tells Nugget to go before it crushes her too. Fortunately, Nugget manages to save the day at the last minute, sparing the couple’s lives.
• Humongous Mecha: The first boss is a giant chainsaw mecha which is essentially an upgrade of Lil' Slugger called Big Slugger, though instead of simply running from it, Meat Boy fights it in this game. Big Slugger is later used by the vengeful Chipper Grove critters, and powered by the Manipulator to use against Dr. Fetus, but he sets it to self-destruct before they can attack him.
• Inventional Wisdom: Why does Dr. Fetus have a button that undoes his mortal form right next to him in his lair?
• Jungle Japes: Chipper Grove has shades of this. At one point in the stage, the background is a deep green and is full of towering trees and tangles of large vines.
• Lemony Narrator: The narrator of the intro cutscene, to an extent, from claiming Dr. Fetus isn't a real doctor to his Suddenly Shouting moment below.
• Mama Bear/Papa Wolf: Meat Boy and Bandage Girl go through great lengths to rescue their baby from the hands of Dr. Fetus. Also unlike the last game, instead of an Action Survivor they both Took a Level in Badass and can fight and kill enemies on their path to save Nugget.
• Mind Screw: The minute that button on Dr. Fetus's throne is pushed, things get weird; a Time Crash occurs, the Earth is enveloped in some giant glowy thing, Meat Boy and Bandage Girl become elderly versions of themselves, and Dr. Fetus... vanishes into nothingness. (He tries to take physical form again when you complete each level, but always ends up failing.)
• Nice Mean And In Between: The main characters all seem to have this dynamic. Nugget is an innocent and cheerful baby who serves as the Nice and Dr. Fetus obviously serves as the Mean. Whether you decide to play as Meat Boy or Bandage Girl, both of them will serve as the In-Between, as while still good guys, they are still a Mama Bear and Papa Wolf duo who are no pushovers when it comes to reaching their baby.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Continuing the trend from “Carmeaty Burena” and “Meatal Acropolis”, the soundtrack during the fight against Alpha Omega, “Wurst-Case Scenario”, has a prominent usage of this.
• One-Winged Angel: Dr. Fetus becomes a cosmic storm called Alpha Omega with a spiral galaxy for a monocle and hypergiant for an eye due to trying to reform in the last world, with it serving as the final boss of the game.
• Optional Boss: The bosses of the original Super Meat Boy all return as special Warp Zone stages, and each one requires mechanics that are, at the very least, mildly evocative of what was happening in their original fights.
  • Lil Slugger still has a timer for how long you can dilly dally, but rather than being an Advancing Wall of Doom, is instead the target of a minigame similar to the Street Fighter bonus stages where you break a car as fast as you can. Dr. Fetus then hops in and tweets about how some teenagers messed up his ride. (Or, if you're playing as him, claims that some teenagers did for the insurance money.)
  • C.H.A.D. is still fought by ducking and weaving around him to hit him three times, but instead, you do so in the style of a typical Punch-Out boxing match to knock him out. Dr. Fetus attempts to cheat by counting in half-measures to give C.H.A.D. a chance to get up, but you end up winning by a Technical Knockout.
  • Brownie is still a race, but instead of being a race between the two of you to escape a rising hazard, it's more like an obstacle course run between old Friendly Rivals where the only motivator is beating Brownie to the end.
  • Little Horn still menaces you from the background while you dodge him, but instead of waiting until he wears himself down, you're navigating an F-Zero style race track littered with flaming Meat Boy corpses.
  • The Larries require you to make them smash their head into environmental hazards, but is instead done as a send-up to Mortal Kombat, where you need to work up strength to break a given material and force them to do it before they're ready. The final material is of course, a sawblade.
  • Even Dr. Fetus qualifies for this trope when he appears in a Warp Zone. In his boss fight, he fired at Meat Boy with a bazooka as they ran through a maze. However, this time, you’re playing as Bandage Girl, and the fight plays out like a Mega Man boss battle- Metal Man's, to be specific (complete with Dr. Fetus throwing sawblades and a conveyor belt).
• Retcon:
  • In Super Meat Boy, Meat Ninja is Meat Boy with a black suit and an eyepatch. In Forever, he's Meat Boy with gray eyebrows and a beard. The eyepatch is moved to Bandage Girl's counterpart, Bandage Ripper.
  • A somewhat blatant example: the ending to Super Meat Boy shows Bandage Girl to be pregnant with Dr. Fetus, but that cliffhanger was dropped in favor of Bandage Girl giving birth to Nugget. Edmund even stated himself that the game was going to have an entirely different beginning before leaving the team.
• Revenge: In the aftermath of the first boss fight against Big Slugger in Chipper Grove, the critters, lead by a squirrel without an arm and who looks like Solid Snake, use Big Slugger and Manipulator to get payback for destroying their forest. While they fail due to Dr. Fetus having installed a self-destruct mechanism, the squirrel barely gets one over him by pressing a button on his throne after dying, which causes a Time Crash. When everything is restored, the critters see the defeated Dr. Fetus and are satisfied with this, and walk away.
• Sarcastic Clapping: Dr. Fetus does this for a good few seconds when confronted by Meat Boy and Bandage Girl in his lab.
• Sequel Escalation: In Chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy, Dr. Fetus nukes the planet. In Chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy Forever, Dr. Fetus inadvertently allows Solid Squirrel to mangle the fabric of time... and unlike the predecessor, there's no Status Quo Is God - nothing is ever shown getting better in the doomed timeline.
• Sequel Hook: There’s an after-credits scene that shows Dr. Fetus has returned to his villainous ways, creating clones of Meat Boy and likely planning his revenge, with a title screen at the very end saying “Dr. Fetus will return”.
• Shifting Sand Land: Tetanusville.
• Shovel Strike: Dr. Fetus does this to Meat Boy and Bandage Girl in the opening cutscene, just before kidnapping Nugget.
• Slide Attack: In addition to punching enemies, you can also do this.
• Soft Glass: Meat Boy can punch through glass and end up unscathed, despite his Made of Plasticine defense.
• Sweat Drop: In the mobile trailer, a visible sweat drop appears on Meat Boy's temple (with another appearing on his forehead) when he realizes Dr. Fetus is going to force him into his phone. Also, two visible sweat drops appear near Dr. Fetus' temple while staring in horror at the result of this.
• Suddenly Shouting: In the opening cutscene: "One day, while our heroes were enjoying life... DOCTOR FETUS ATTACKED THEM! AND KIDNAPPED NUGGET!" The serene music is still playing as this happens.
• Tabletop Game: Super Meat Boy Forever also has a tie-in card game, called Super Meat Boy: Rival Rush.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Meat Boy himself. Although he was already badass to begin with, he is even more of a Determinator in this game, continuously running without stopping, and even gaining the ability to punch enemies. Justified as it's his kid who gets kidnapped this time around.
  • Bandage Girl also gets a larger role in this game, accompanying Meat Boy on the journey.
  • Tofu Boy, of all people, managed to become as fast as the rest of the cast. He still isn't fully capable, however, as he will occasionally stop to catch his breath regardless of the player's input.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The warp zone minigames vary drastically from standard gameplay. Tetanusville, for example, has a Punch-Out!! esque fight against C.H.A.D..

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