The Indie Informer

It was the sixth level of Super Meat Boy 3D that made me take pause. It took me nine attempts to get through it while I breezed through each of the previous five levels in a single run. In retrospect, nine tries isn’t very many and the level didn’t take me very long, but despite thinking I had finished the majority of the tutorial levels, the spike in difficulty made me realize that I was still in it. Super Meat Boy 3D was easing me in to teach me a crucial lesson: you are going to die. A lot.

Super Meat Boy 3D is a game about being beaten into submission. Each level is a gauntlet of 3D platforming packed to the brim with spinning buzzsaws, incinerating lasers, and metal spike traps — obstacles that kill you instantly if you so much as brush against them. The game starts in classic fashion with Dr. Fetus, a fetus-piloted mech suit, kidnapping Meat Boy’s girlfriend, Bandage Girl, and it’s up to you to launch yourself over, under, through, and around the flames and blades and acid vats to save the girl and live happily ever after. At the end of each level, you chase the pair down before Bandage Girl is inevitably ripped away from you the second you reach her. The end screen for each level is a different vignete of Meat Boy having his teeth kicked in by Dr. Fetus as he pulls Bandage Girl away from him. The message here is clear: Even when you’re winning, you’re still going to take a beating.

What I find compelling about finishing a level in Super Meat Boy 3D, however, is that after Dr. Fetus grabs Bandage Girl and you see your final run time, you watch a playback of your path to the end featuring each and every attempt you made to get there. All at once, you watch nine or ten or 20 or 50 different Meat Boys attempting to run the level as all but one get grounded into a red paste, falling short of the goal.

It’s fun to watch all of your past failures play out, especially if it was a particularly tough level, but there’s something kind of inspiring about seeing a manifestation of your endurance visualized on screen. Even at it’s most frustrating (and trust me, Super Meat Boy 3D can certainly be frustrating) being reminded of your effort feels like the only bit of hope you can have in a game as punishing as this. It never feels like it at the time when you’re on attempt number 14 of figuring out the exact angle you need to jump past a laser gate, but watching it all play back made me feel like I was actually learning something with each failure. Like each run that ended in a frustrating and quick death was a lesson I needed to learn to clear the hurdles each level threw at me.

What I like most about the platforming in Super Meat Boy 3D is the sheer number of platforms that are completely optional. In your first attempt through a level, you might try jumping on every surface available to you as you chart your path to the end. However, as you get more comfortable navigating the level’s various pitfalls, you start to realize that you can skip entire sections. It makes each level feel fluid and like you’re outsmarting the game at times by breaking apart the critical path. It’s especially fun to watch in the playback at the end of each level since you can see how much time you save once you start taking major shortcuts when compared to previous runs where you were following the critical path.

Those moments of platforming genius are what keep the core of Super Meat Boy 3D feeling fresh and alive, as you search each level for the skip that catapults you to the end. That said, the boss encounters at the end of each world drag the experience down since they each require specific platforming solutions without any flexibility. It feels like most of the levels of the game are teaching you to think outside of the box and find ways around various platforming hurdles, but the second you start a boss fight, you end up having to wait around as the boss slowly breaks apart the level or performs their prescripted attack sequence that you have to dodge.

Super Meat Boy 3D feels like it’s encouraging you to whip past the parts of each level that you’ve already mastered so you can get to the next part that you’re trying to figure out, but with how slow the boss battles go, they’re something of a drag on the breakneck pacing.

As much as I like challenging games, there is a difference between challenge and bullshit — a difference that certain levels of Super Meat Boy 3D could stand to learn. I don’t mind retrying a level over and over and over again while I work on solving its platforming puzzles, but there were some puzzles so challenging that left me scratching my head saying “surely, there’s another way, right?” Sometimes the answer is “yes” which leads to that incredible feeling of outsmarting the game using my platforming skills, but often the answer is a flat out “no.” This isn’t an inherent problem if learning those various sections felt like they were relying on precision that I didn’t quite master yet, but with relative frequency, there are some sections that are a complete crapshoot.

It’s all well and good to learn from your mistakes by following the blood trail that Meat Boy leaves behind with each attempt, but sometimes there’s nothing to learn from the level that increases your platforming skillset.

Despite my complaining, I do think that there are more good levels in Super Meat Boy 3D than bad. I haven’t played them all yet (there’s an entire second half of the game called the Dark World that’s full of challenge levels only unlocked by clearing certain par times from each Light World level,) but I did find a lot of joy in the levels that had me beaten to a pulp as I said to myself “okay, just a few more tries, I’m so close.”

There are a handful of small things about Super Meat Boy 3D that I found irritating like it’s crude Newgrounds-style humor and generic soundtrack that feels like what I would call “Guitar Center-core,” but those are relatively small complaints. The humor is about as prevelent as the game’s main narrative (which is to say, hardly at all) and it’s easy enough to turn down the music in the settings and put something else on in your headphones that doesn’t grate the nerves.

Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t Shakespeare — it’s main antagonist is named Dr. Fetus, afterall — but I found its platforming puzzles to be largely solid across the board and I was impressed by its adherence to the idea that the game will happily beat you down, but the way back up from that is through perserverence. Perserverence that it’s happy to show you that you posses by watching your level replays.