What’s better than listening to me rabbit on about a game for 1000 words? Listening to me rabbit on about a game for 400 words, then adding your own two cents to the debate.
Good times.
This week’s community review focuses on Super Meat Boy. You may have heard me ranting about this game in some comments and posts over the last week – and for good reason – Super Meat Boy is simultaneously one of the toughest and most rewarding games I’ve played since Trials HD.
In fact, despite technically existing in two separate and distinct genres, the Trials HD and Super Meat Boy comparison is a useful one. Both are indie games with roots in flash, but more importantly both have a pitch perfect difficulty curve that progresses until you find yourself staring vacantly up a sheer crevasse that’ll rip your nerve endings to shreds.
Yet as painful as that sounds, there’s a lot of pleasure to be derived from the pain. Like Trials HD, Super Meat Boy is all about repetition; repetition till the point where your muscle memory is cluttered with precise jumps, exact timing, and pitch perfect manipulation. It forces you to learn through trial and error but strangely enough, as tough as things get, it never gets frustrating to the point where you want to quit.
Super Meat Boy exists on the precipice, and is all the better for it. It’s one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve had this year, and it all comes down to the controls and level design. The controls feel completely tactile and precise, whereas the levels themselves are often criminally intelligent in the way they force you to think your way through.
Super Meat Boy works because every single one of your inevitable deaths will have been your fault, and the only way to avoid death is to improve and practice your way to victory.
What do you guys think – is it too tough? Are the controls a little too sticky? Has anyone here 100% the game yet? Let us know some of your favourite levels and tell us what you loved and hated about the game.
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