‘Super Meat Boy’ Unforgivingness in a casual wrapper

By now,  you should be familiar with Super Meat Boy – the intense indie game that rose to prominence in 2010, after its debut on Xbox Live Arcade. Six years later, that very game has become available on the Wii U, and it is a moment of a certain magnitude.

For the unfamiliar, Super Meat Boy is a 2D sidescrolling platformer, and the objective of the game is to transport the protagonist, Meat Boy himself, to Bandage Girl, his beloved damsel in distress, who is usually located on the other side of the level. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well, here’s the catch. Super Meat Boy is as far from simple as anything could possibly be. The game is extremely fast-paced and incredibly unforgiving. The controls are smooth and responsive, but the overwhelming difficulty of the game manages to water down the beautifully executed mechanics. As you progress through the levels, you’re faced with wave after wave of various obstacles that will stop at nothing in their quest to stop you in your tracks. And in most cases, they succeed.

This is where the heart of Super Meat Boys success comes into play – Super Meat Boy is executed in such a manner that makes you want to keep on playing without it getting tiresome. No matter how many times you turn into a goopy pool of meat on the ground, you will be tempted to try again. It’s hard to determine which aspect of the game is causing this – it could be the speedy, smooth controls that allow the player to make use of a wide range of acrobatics. It could also be the lively retro-styled graphics that urges the player into returning to the game just one more time and/or the innovative level design, that is flawlessly executed without it ever becoming too repetitive for one’s taste.

No matter what it is, Super Meat Boy is indeed infused with a formula that makes it appealing to everyone from the most casual of gamers, to those who are always up for a challenge. One could say that the game is the personification of frustration, coated with an appealing layer of sheer fun that attracts all sorts of gamers. While the Wii U port doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it is indeed the same old Super Meat Boy that we all grew to love, and in the end, it makes a fine addition to the ever-expanding library that is the Nintendo eShop.