When Meat Boy or Bandage Girl slide, they stick out a fist or foot in a vicious-looking, weirdly satisfying punch. One big difference, of course, is that you can attack now. At the end of every level, you find Nugget again… just in time for Dr. Naturally, this is a Meat Boy game, so even on the first stage, there are jumps that require a pixel-perfect approach to survive.Īs usual, Meat Boy inhabits a universe that is anywhere from 50% to 99% swinging blades at any given time, and navigating each stage is a short gauntlet of deadly leaps, murderous traps, freak mutants, and strange hazards. It basically reduces the number of things you have to keep track of, so you can focus entirely on timing your jumps and slides. I was initially wary of the premise since it sounded a lot like one of those endless-runner phone games, but playing it feels better than I expected. You can jump, slide, rebound off of walls, and use special tiles to change your direction, but you can’t actually ever stop. From the moment you hit the ground, your character – both Meat Boy and Bandage Girl are playable and mechanically identical – takes off at a dead sprint to the right. The significant change in Forever over Super Meat Boy is that now, your character never stops moving. Fetus was very visibly stomped into mucilage at the end of Super Meat Boy. (I asked Refenes at PAX what the deal was there, as Dr. Fetus abruptly shows up and kidnaps Nugget. (One of my favorite things about Nugget is the look on Meat Boy’s face, as if every time he sees the kid, he remembers he’s a dad all over again.) It’s been some time since the original Super Meat Boy, long enough for Meat Boy and Bandage Girl to settle down and have a kid, named Nugget. The best thing about Meat Boy, in general, has always been its “why the hell not” atmosphere, where you go from hell to heaven to 8-bit flashbacks and back again without rhyme, reason, or sense, and Super Meat Boy Forever has that in spades. Much like Meat Boy himself, it’s cheerful and oblivious to anyone else’s opinion. That isn’t really the case with Super Meat Boy Forever. (Maybe the world is telling us not to name our sequels “Forever.”)Īfter spending that much time in development hell, with a couple of different false starts, you’d think the final product would end up feeling a little self-conscious. Super Meat Boy Forever is now scheduled to come out… well, when it comes out. Since then, Team Meat has grown to 14 people, including a full-time artist, level designer, and animator (and notably not including co-creator Edmund McMillen). The release date has shifted forward one year once a year since 2014 or so. It was initially prototyped in 2011, begun and initially showed off at PAX West in 2014, stopped entirely in 2017, and then “basically started over” later that year. He is our bloody patron saint of difficult but mostly fair platform challenges.Īccording to its lead programmer/business manager/producer/writer Tommy Refenes, Super Meat Boy Forever has been in the works off and on for around eight years. Whenever you play a Mario Maker level that’s 90% elaborately rotating spikes and saw blades, or spend several hours beating your head against a stage in Celeste or Cuphead, Meat Boy is there in spirit. Every demanding, unapologetically challenging platformer from the last decade, to my mind, owes at least a symbolic debt to Super Meat Boy. It spurred a flurry of imitators, great and small. Super Meat Boy was a genuine hit, selling over a million copies.
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