Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is one of the major indie games of 2010. This is very surprising especially when looking at the difficulty level of this game. This is literally is right on the top of the hardest games ever. Right in line with N+ or Splosion Man. Similarities to other 2010 top indie game VVVVVV can be also found in the short stages and the retro look.

Game bears resemblances to 8bit gaming times in all fronts of the presentation. This is with simplistic Meat Boy sprite and the plain 2D backgrounds. Music follows the same style with 34 of tracks of delightful chiptune inspirited compositions.

Objective is simple, get to your girlfriend Bandage Girl in end of level. By avoiding saw blades and every other lunacy game throws at you. Every 20 level there is a boss fight which require different approach. Game has also a Dark World which takes the normal plain levels and turns these in to even harder levels. There is also a third mode where player has only 3 lives to go through the few levels.

Despite the excruciating difficulty for some reason game never felt unfair. Surely one get stuck for hours when nailing a certain jump. The failing never becomes the blame of the mechanism. This is down to the controls which are very tight. Meat Boy moves exactly as you control it and the jumping time can be tightly nailed down to a millimetre or millisecond. Which is absolutely necessary when battling through the 300+ levels. One cool feature is a replay function. After each level the effort's are played back showing each death in the level as well as the one single Meat Boy that made it through. There is something very satisfying watching own replay.

To add further depth Super Meat Boy honours its fellow indie games by having other indie game character as unlockables. Such as The Kid, Gish, Tim and Commander Video to name few. These all control completely differently than the main character himself. Shamefully unlocking them is massive task, such as the top prize The Ninja which is 100 bandages. This is not just finishing 100 levels but 100 bandages which always are harder to get to. Would have been interesting to try out the out characters, but not for that prize.

This is a full score game but seeing how I somehow managed to drop half point from my VVVVVV review, which is my favourite indie game of 2010 I can not give Super Meat Boy a better score. Meaning half score is deducted because of the difficulty of unlocking all the indie characters. By the time one has gone to extra mile and collected the extra difficult bandages to unlock new characters. The chances are that there is not lot of interest playing the game through with that character again. Having said that Steam Christmas sales made me buy this for PC as well. Get to play with Captain Viridian on it!