Super Meat Boy Forever Review

Twelve years after Meat Boy made his first appearance on a screen, fans of the incredibly tight platformer Super Meat Boy were gifted the release of their highly anticipated sequel: Super Meat Boy Forever. I, too, could not wait to get killed repeatedly by sawblades in new, creative fashions, hoping that each death would mean learning from my own mistakes, that each death would be a consequence of my own missteps.
Despite my enthusiasm, I was also very careful to keep my excitement at bay. I have played my fair share of games by Edmund Mc. Millen, designer of Super Meat Boy and The End is Nigh, to stay on-topic by mentioning two precise platformers, and his influence on the original Super Meat Boy is very obvious. Having jumped ship in 2017 by leaving Team Meat, he would not be involved at all in the development of Super Meat Boy Forever, and so I went into this game with tempered expectations.

But enough with the comparisons. Starting Super Meat Boy Forever, everything looks very familiar – in a good, cozy, “feel at home” kinda way. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl are finally back, now joined by their adorable offspring, Nugget, a small, pacifier-sucking, rabbit-eared cube. Enter Dr. Fetus, our favorite villain, kidnapping Nugget and setting the stage for our superficial yet entertaining and loose narrative. The content and significance of a plot can be an integral part of what makes a game great / meaningful – look no further than Celeste to find a precision platformer that exemplifies just that – but with Meat Boy and Bandage Girl, it is all about having fun. The presentation shines through beautifully animated, over-the-top cutscenes that are just a joy to watch. Visually, Super Meat Boy Forever excels with stunning levels and a varied and interesting enemy and hazard design. The iconic sawblades are present from the very first level, and are supplemented with electricity beams, exploding blocks, netting wire and many more threats and obstacles as you reach the later worlds. The game consists of five regular worlds, each concluding with visually appealing boss fights. Additionally, dark versions of these worlds ramp up the challenge. There is also a unique “glitch world”, whose levels are unlocked by finding and beating a warp zone in each regular world.

However visually appealing, precision-based games need to play well to keep a player invested, need to be fun, need to feel fair and rewarding. Unfortunately, this is where Super Meat Boy Forever fails to live up to its predecessor’s precision-platforming excellence, showing glaring flaws in its design and leaving one wishing for a different Meat Boy game.

Super Meat Boy Forever is not a precision platformer. The game is designed to be an auto-runner, removing player control over Meat Boy’s movement, limiting actions to either jumping / wall-jumping / punching with one, and diving / sliding with a second button. This is by no means a bad design choice a priori, with various auto-runners having released to very positive critical acclaim. It is also a genre that feels like an obvious choice for a mobile-game, which Super Meat Boy Forever was intended as originally. However, the auto-runner aspect combined with the choice of seed-based level generation results in a rather questionable pairing, on many levels.

Starting a new game, a random seed – which can still be manipulated by the player – is generated for the chosen save file. Each of the levels for that save file is then generated by chaining together roughly six to eight hand-designed “chunks” from a pool of 7200 chunks total, with the choice and order of the chunks depending on the seed. This inevitably leads to very generic feeling levels, and nothing feels memorable.

Consequently, while each chunk has a difficulty rating assigned to it and it is made sure that the more difficult chunks can only appear in the dark worlds, this design choice leads to an imbalance in difficulty between seeds. Two people playing on two different seeds will have two different experiences. Not only when it comes to difficulty, but also when it comes to balance and fairness. This issue is further magnified when attempting challenging feats like deathless runs.

The quality disparity between hand-designed “chunks” and the lack of consistency in level difficulty present frustrating challenges. Some chunks feel straight up unfair, with bad telegraphs or unintuitive clearing paths, while other require you to perform actions in order to clear the path forward before you actually encounter the obstacle blocking your path. Many chunks haven softlock potential, even, forcing the player to restart the entire level.

And the worst thing about the above is, that you feel entirely alone on your journey. The absence of a consistent player experience diminishes the formation of a community that typically rallies together to overcome challenges in other demanding games. Finding deathless strategies, speedrun strategies, finding collectibles and be supportive of each other. This lack of community support leaves players stranded when faced with difficult chunks, making it difficult to find strategies or discuss optimal approaches. Even finding collectibles or tackling deathless runs becomes a solitary endeavor, robbing the game of the motivating sense of community present in other challenging titles. There is still a chunk in my original seed that – to this day – I could only clear by finding an unintended cut, and never figured out the intended path. Coupled with the design issues, this isolating experience undermines the purported infinite replayability, making Super Meat Boy Forever a game that does little to keep players invested for long.