After 10 long years Super Meat Boy is back, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels a lot of the original, except for what I loved most about it: fast controls and rigid platform. In the year of Spelunky 2 and Hades, it is a disappointment to see the return of Meat Boy without the main aspects that made it great.
Super Meat Boy Forever was originally announced in 2014 as a mobile game. Then, half of the indie duo Team Meat, Edmund McMillen, left the focus on other projects, leaving co-creator Tommy Refenes to restart the project alone for consoles in 2017. Other developers were eventually recruited, the new Team Meat announced a date of launch from early 2019, and almost two years later, is finally here.
Released last week as a timed exclusive for the Epic Games Store and Switch – the game will eventually reach other platforms—Super Meat Boy Forever force your smiling hamburger to run forward at a steady pace as you bend, jump and punch your way through procedurally generated enemies and obstacles. Instead of the heavily injured death dungeons in the first game, ForeverThe levels are more extensive, side-scrolling events full of random dangers that appear every time you generate a new game world. None of these elements are bad in themselves, but they don’t really come together to make an arcade platform game that I want to go back to.
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Mainly because of how the game controls. Being overwhelmed with constant momentum seems to be at odds with the 2010 free-bouncing flow Super Meat Boy great. You can change direction by jumping over walls or running on ramps, but for the most part Forever it’s about decoding the exact combination of jumps, punches and wall slides to pass a certain circular saw dam and then execute them to guide Meat Boy to safety, as if remotely controlling a meaty rocket. There is a disconnect between solving the puzzle and actually executing the solution that left me indifferent.
It doesn’t help that Super Meat Boy Forever it seems especially fluctuating, made worse by occasional slowdowns when a lot of things are happening. I had frame rate problems when playing it on my Asus Zenbook, which seems to be isolated some difficulty around certain PC settings. I didn’t play the game on the Switch, but it’s locked at 1080p at 60 fps and seems to work fine based on GameXplainplaying time.
Forever has a positive point: your boss fight. Rather than always being driven forward, the boss’s stages provide enough tools to navigate a confined area and take down villainous Dr. Fetus’s contraptions, maneuvering back and forth to target weaknesses. These meetings are cleverly planned and fun to discover, even when dozens of deaths accumulate in the process. There were also the moments when the brilliance of the original game was most evident.
The original Super Meat Boy was part of a new wave of indie tributes to genre classics. Two years before that, Spelunky exited. In 2011, Supergiant Games released Bastion. This year, all three saw direct sequels or spiritual successors, with Hades building and going far beyond the foundation established in Bastion. In this context, Super Meat Boy Forever it’s especially disappointing, offering not just more of the same treasured classic, but instead an oddly compromised spin-off whose self-racing presumption seems stifling, without bringing anything exceptionally new or valuable to the table. It’s not a terrible game, and it’s still full of scenes that tell a new airy chapter in Meat Boy-verse. But it’s still a drag.