Super Meat Boy Review

I love Super Meat Boy. I want to hug it and give it awards and then hit it with something large and heavy until its lifeless body stops twitching and then throw it into a river with cement shoes on. Then I shall dive in after it screaming “I’m sorry!” at the top of my lungs while weeping slightly.

This is the somewhat confusing relationship I have with this brutally difficult platformer. I both love it and hate it. I’m absolutely addicted to an experience that should rightfully have me in tears, not of joy, but of pain and sorrow. Instead, I’m finding that I can’t put it down and don’t quite know why.

Traditionally, a review of a difficult game is supposed to start with a warning. Something along the lines of, “this game isn’t for the faint of heart” or “this game isn’t for the easily frustrated”. But therein lies the beauty of Super Meat Boy. Lines like these are not necessary. I am, in fact, “the easily frustrated” and I am smitten by Meat Boy’s masochistic charms.

Through a brilliant combination of precise control, superb level design, and forgiving game mechanics that do not punish death but instead reward skill, Super Meat Boy takes what could have been one of the most maddening games ever to be released upon the gaming public and turns it into a sublime example of pure gaming at its best.

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