Unfortunately, this one was pretty disappointing for me. The game has been in the back of my mind for a decade, since I first saw it in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie when I was about 12. At the time, it really caught my eye, although admittedly not as much as its "co-star", Fez.
To a certain extent, I still think this game is important; it was one of the earliest major titles of the indie boom of the 2010s, exuding the vibe of the Xbox Live Arcade era to which it was released. Without games like this becoming massively popular on Newgrounds in the early 2010s, drawing the eyes of the major publishers like Microsoft, I do not believe we would have the indie scene that we have today. In some ways that might be better, as now we often refer to games with publishers like Annapurna, as indies, despite them very obviously not being indies, while Baldur's Gate 3, which is actually independently published, is triple-A. It was games like Super Meat Boy that made this change, the blurring of the lines, occur. Unfortunately, despite having a major impact on the industry, I do not believe the game has really earned any more respect than the exact amount it is owed for this impact, however much that might be.
I do not just want to compare this game to Celeste, like so many do, but it is hard not to do that. All I'll say on that front is that if you haven't played either Super Meat Boy or Celeste, I would tell you to play Celeste first. Still, I want to mainly focus on this game as its own thing.
Throughout the experience, I really felt like the game was trying too hard, and failing at what it was trying to do. Over the course of 6 chapters (the 6th only has 6 levels, mind you), you are faced with only a few different mechanics and enemies, but none of these are really that creative, and I felt that they were rarely used to their full potential. I will say that I have only beaten the light world and a couple of the dark missions, so there is the possibility that I'm missing something truly spectacular, but I still don't think that excuses the fact that the main game is so lackluster. None of these missions were that memorable, apart from maybe how frustrating and counter-intuitive they can be.
That was probably my main gripe with the game: it always feels as though it is at odds with itself. There is a massive emphasis on going fast in Super Meat Boy; one of your only abilities is to run, every level is timed, and the leaderboards are 100% based on the times you set. Despite this, the game often forces you to wait for things to happen, such as the timing of temporary platforms being such that you must stand still for a couple of seconds at the start of a level in order to land on the first one. Incredibly, the final level of the game, the boss fight with "Dr. Fetus" (this name, by the way, is a decent example of the poorly aged 2010 edgy/epic randomness humor that was prevalent at the time), is the worst offender for this. The level is set up so that you have no choice but to stand dead still for about 15 seconds before the boundry obstacles begin to move. This is utterly absurd to me, because it is not just a case of me being faster than the devs expected me to be like in earlier levels, but them actually just not letting you move for the first few seconds in the last level of the game.
The level design also leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that any time the devs spotted a playtester pull off a cool move, they made a special point to put an obstacle directly in their path, just so that having fun and theory crafting is not possible to the extent that it really should be in a game like this. The levels all just have a general vibe that the layout was constructed first, then the obstacles were placed in order to make the path more annoying for the player, as opposed to the level being constructed with a particular idea in mind. If I had to guess, I would say that this was done in order to construct this artificial sense of difficulty. The game is not actually that hard, it just often feels more like you are trying to persevere past the difficulties, rather than overcome them through mastery over the mechanics.
I also have to mention that the boss fight with the worms is probably one of the worst boss fights I have ever played. Not only is it badly designed, but it is also super easy to cheese. If you just jump between two of the saw blades at the edge of the map, you can basically just wait for the worms to jump into obstacles by themselves, without needing to do anything. This still takes forever though, because the worms seemingly choose their moves by just picking a number between 1 and 3. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty likely that they pull out the "pop up out of the ground and do nothing" move, once again leaving you to just wait on the game to be ready for you to start interacting with it.
When talking about their inspirations for Super Meat Boy, the developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes said the game is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2". But is it really? In my opinion, this is an uninspired attempt at a precision platformer with largely imprecise controls, contextualised in overly-edgy humour which is very of its time, which promises to be extremely difficult, but is actually not that hard to beat and is sometimes even possible to completely cheese. So, no. I do not think this is a throwback, and I don't believe anyone will ever be creating a throwback to it.
To a certain extent, I still think this game is important; it was one of the earliest major titles of the indie boom of the 2010s, exuding the vibe of the Xbox Live Arcade era to which it was released. Without games like this becoming massively popular on Newgrounds in the early 2010s, drawing the eyes of the major publishers like Microsoft, I do not believe we would have the indie scene that we have today. In some ways that might be better, as now we often refer to games with publishers like Annapurna, as indies, despite them very obviously not being indies, while Baldur's Gate 3, which is actually independently published, is triple-A. It was games like Super Meat Boy that made this change, the blurring of the lines, occur. Unfortunately, despite having a major impact on the industry, I do not believe the game has really earned any more respect than the exact amount it is owed for this impact, however much that might be.
I do not just want to compare this game to Celeste, like so many do, but it is hard not to do that. All I'll say on that front is that if you haven't played either Super Meat Boy or Celeste, I would tell you to play Celeste first. Still, I want to mainly focus on this game as its own thing.
Throughout the experience, I really felt like the game was trying too hard, and failing at what it was trying to do. Over the course of 6 chapters (the 6th only has 6 levels, mind you), you are faced with only a few different mechanics and enemies, but none of these are really that creative, and I felt that they were rarely used to their full potential. I will say that I have only beaten the light world and a couple of the dark missions, so there is the possibility that I'm missing something truly spectacular, but I still don't think that excuses the fact that the main game is so lackluster. None of these missions were that memorable, apart from maybe how frustrating and counter-intuitive they can be.
That was probably my main gripe with the game: it always feels as though it is at odds with itself. There is a massive emphasis on going fast in Super Meat Boy; one of your only abilities is to run, every level is timed, and the leaderboards are 100% based on the times you set. Despite this, the game often forces you to wait for things to happen, such as the timing of temporary platforms being such that you must stand still for a couple of seconds at the start of a level in order to land on the first one. Incredibly, the final level of the game, the boss fight with "Dr. Fetus" (this name, by the way, is a decent example of the poorly aged 2010 edgy/epic randomness humor that was prevalent at the time), is the worst offender for this. The level is set up so that you have no choice but to stand dead still for about 15 seconds before the boundry obstacles begin to move. This is utterly absurd to me, because it is not just a case of me being faster than the devs expected me to be like in earlier levels, but them actually just not letting you move for the first few seconds in the last level of the game.
The level design also leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that any time the devs spotted a playtester pull off a cool move, they made a special point to put an obstacle directly in their path, just so that having fun and theory crafting is not possible to the extent that it really should be in a game like this. The levels all just have a general vibe that the layout was constructed first, then the obstacles were placed in order to make the path more annoying for the player, as opposed to the level being constructed with a particular idea in mind. If I had to guess, I would say that this was done in order to construct this artificial sense of difficulty. The game is not actually that hard, it just often feels more like you are trying to persevere past the difficulties, rather than overcome them through mastery over the mechanics.
I also have to mention that the boss fight with the worms is probably one of the worst boss fights I have ever played. Not only is it badly designed, but it is also super easy to cheese. If you just jump between two of the saw blades at the edge of the map, you can basically just wait for the worms to jump into obstacles by themselves, without needing to do anything. This still takes forever though, because the worms seemingly choose their moves by just picking a number between 1 and 3. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty likely that they pull out the "pop up out of the ground and do nothing" move, once again leaving you to just wait on the game to be ready for you to start interacting with it.
When talking about their inspirations for Super Meat Boy, the developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes said the game is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2". But is it really? In my opinion, this is an uninspired attempt at a precision platformer with largely imprecise controls, contextualised in overly-edgy humour which is very of its time, which promises to be extremely difficult, but is actually not that hard to beat and is sometimes even possible to completely cheese. So, no. I do not think this is a throwback, and I don't believe anyone will ever be creating a throwback to it.