Super Meat Boy Forever

Genre: Auto-Runner

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from MB. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Super Meat Boy Forever, released on PC in 2020 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is the follow-up to the 2010 game Super Meat Boy, though it’s up for debate whether this is a sequel or a spin-off. The uncertainty comes from the fact that Super Meat Boy Forever plays very differently from its predecessor. Where the first game was a more standard Platformer, Super Meat Boy Forever is an Auto-Runner where players only use two buttons (one face button and the down button), and the levels are to some extent randomly-generated.

While the gameplay may be somewhat simplified here, you’d never know it looking at the game. Suffice it to say, Super Meat Boy Forever has an outstanding presentation, with great animation in-game and excellent cartoony animation for cutscenes in-between game worlds, with these scenes depicting the continuing struggle between Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, and their rival Dr. Fetus, who this time around has kidnapped the meaty couple’s kid, Nugget. As in the first game, Super Meat Boy Forever is filled with tons of fun references to other videogames, although this game lacks all the cameo appearances the original was filled with.

The soundtrack this time around is good, though unfortunately isn’t quite as good as Danny Baranowsky’s outstanding music in the original version of the first game. However, this soundtrack is definitely more diverse, with songs ranging from the goofy-sounding Sex and Violins to the epic-sounding Jerky and Out of Thyme. Overall, it’s still a pretty good soundtrack, even if I still prefer the original.

When it comes to the gameplay, as previously mentioned, players have only two buttons to use in Super Meat Boy Forever, but the game is very clever about getting everything it can out of those two buttons, making both of them multifunctional in what they do at any given time, and also making that function change based on the context of the situation.

Players run forward automatically, standing still only when walking into an obstruction, and changing directions only when performing a wall jump, hitting a small triangular corner piece, or making use of a specific late-game power-up. Pressing any of the face buttons will make you jump, and pressing it again in mid-air will perform a horizontal air dash that doubles as an attack, with this dash-attack only recharging when players hit an enemy or land back on the ground. Players can also press the button to perform a wall jump when pressing against a wall. When players encounter one-use power-ups later, they are activated instead of the dash-attack when pressing the button in mid-air, and players can then opt to dash-attack afterwards while still in the air. Again, all of that last paragraph is stuff you do in this game just by using one thumb to press one button.

Your other thumb will be positioned over the down button, which is used to slide under obstructions or dive at a steep downward angle when in mid-air. Both of these moves also function as an attack, and players can tap them repeatedly to attack multiple times in succession – something that will prove absolutely vital in this game’s boss fights.

The choice to limit the game to only two buttons is one that gave me very conflicting feelings about Super Meat Boy Forever, and one that is undoubtedly leading to some very mixed opinions in those who play it. The original Super Meat Boy was celebrated in part thanks to its smooth, responsive controls that made its high challenge level seem far less daunting, and every death in that game just meant you had to step up your game and fine-tune your own playing in order to persevere.

The same is true in Super Meat Boy Forever, but now players have far less to work with, meaning that not only do players have fewer options to improve when they keep dying in a part of the game, but those options often demand far more exacting precision from players. The game offsets this somewhat by adding checkpoints to the game’s levels, which does help. However, players aren’t given any sort of help in the game’s boss stages, which makes for a huge spike in difficulty at these bosses.

For the most part, these boss fights are the absolute worst part of this game, as they are often less about skill and observation and more about rote memorization, with one late-game boss being a particularly frustrating offender in this regard. And while this was also an issue in the original Super Meat Boy, the fact that players are limited to only two buttons here means this often becomes an exercise in getting your muscle memory to remember which button to tap at which time.

I feel like this high difficulty is present in part to mask this game’s length – with only five worlds containing six levels each (as well as an equal number of dark world variants of those levels) plus the aforementioned bosses, Super Meat Boy Forever feels like a far less substantial game than its predecessor, which featured seven worlds, most of which contained over three times as many levels.

However, Super Meat Boy Forever does have one last card up its sleeve to counter this complaint – the aforementioned randomized levels. When starting each game, players can opt to change around characters in a sequence to create a unique seed with levels that are completely different than other seeds, making for potentially thousands of levels in this game. These randomized levels you’re playing through will consist of multiple pre-made “chunks” of levels stitched together. This ensures that each level is beatable, and that the moment-to-moment gameplay is well-designed. In fact, the level design here is occasionally outright brilliant, and some of the clever tricks used here to push the limits of the two-button gameplay are absolutely inspired.

However, as enticing as this may sound, this comes with a lot of caveats. For one thing, this randomization has no effect on the game’s bosses, which remain the exact same flavor of intolerably difficult no matter what your seed is. Also, the use of these level chunks means that playing through the game multiple times will undoubtedly see you replaying the same sections of levels in different seeds, even if the levels themselves are put together differently. This also robs each level of some of its own identity. One level may be the one that introduces a certain gameplay element in every seed of the game, but different chunks will use that element in very different ways that won’t necessarily be consistent from one chunk to the next.

As resourceful as it must have been to find a way to make this game so that its levels would be essentially shredded to pieces and reassembled in a multitude of different orders, I feel like Super Meat Boy Forever would have been better off if the game simply let players play through all of those level sections in a sensible order, arranged by mechanics and themes that would string them together in a memorable way, and in doing so the game could have let players play through all of the game’s content in a way that lets them enjoy everything the game has to offer without throwing the dice and maybe seeing something new in a new randomized seed… you know, like the way the first game worked.

That sorta’ gets to the heart of how I feel about Super Meat Boy Forever. This game has all the pieces of a truly great follow-up to the spectacular original game – The presentation is great, the level design in the moment-to-moment is superb, and there’s a wealth of creativity here. But this game seems to be a bit too clever at times, and some of the things it does to differentiate itself from the first game ultimately work against it. The randomized levels theoretically make for some fun replayability, but in practice they hide content behind different game seeds and dull each level’s unique identity. The change to the Auto-Runner genre theoretically allows this series to give its take on a completely different style of gameplay, but in practice, the constraints of this genre limit one of the core elements that made the original work, its precise controls.

All of this results in a game that I simultaneously love and hate. I can’t help but admire Super Meat Boy Forever for all the things it does right, and it does some things very right. But I also can’t help but despise it for the things it gets wrong, and it gets some stuff agonizingly wrong. And in the end, I’m not sure whether to recommend this game to fans of the original, or not. Or for that matter whether to recommend this to fans of Auto-Runners. There is a lot here to love… but there’s just as much here to frustrate players too. On balance, I’d say if you’re unsure, then go ahead and give this game a try, but be aware of the aforementioned flaws.

tl;dr – Super Meat Boy Forever is a sequel of sorts to the original game that takes its brand of challenging gameplay into the realm of the Auto-Runner, with mixed results. The presentation and moment-to-moment level design is still absolutely superb, with this game doing some wildly creative things with its simple two-button control scheme. However, that same control scheme limits the player’s utility to tackle the game’s difficult challenges, and the much-touted randomized level design only really succeeds at hiding content that would be better off presented in a more traditional, linear fashion. Ultimately, this game’s good qualities still make Super Meat Boy Forever worth a look, even if the flaws definitely detract from the experience.

Grade: B-

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