Super Meat Boy 3D Review - Time to Beat the Meat in 3D

Barely Magic Mike
4 hours ago
9 min read

It was a chilly fall day in 2010. I was in college, living in an off-campus house with three other guys. No, don’t worry, nobody’s breaking the lube out, not that kind of story - just setting the scene. Anyway, on that day during class, the diligent student that I was, with head buried in my phone not listening to a single word the lecturer said, was reading reviews about this weird-sounding new game called Super Meat Boy.

This was in an era when I only ever played physical games I purchased at the store on my Xbox 360. The prospect of paying $15 for a game I didn’t even physically own felt a little strange to me (oh, how times have changed).

But later that day, after taking away from that lecture every ounce of the nothing I put into it, I went home and downloaded that weird-sounding game to see what all the fuss was about. And a few hours later, when my roommates were surrounding me on the couch yelling and cursing as I died for the 40^thtime on the same fucking level, my inner masochist smiled. That’s right, folks – the first indie game I ever loved was Super Meat Boy. Super Meat Boy made me laugh, curse, sweat, scream, and when I was just nearing the climax of an insanely difficult level and ran into a random buzzsaw, collapse in on myself like a dying star, only to remember the entire process only took 20 seconds so ugh let’s just try one more time.

Super Meat Boy is a tough act to follow. Subsequent meat-mascot-themed games like Super Meat Boy Forever and Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine didn’t land nearly as well as the original, so it’s safe to say I was keeping my eye on Super Meat Boy 3D while having my expectations tempered. And in fairness, it’s worth pointing out that Edmund McMillen, both a key creator of the original Super Meat Boy and a name I now realize would be really hard to say ten times fast, has no involvement in this game, having long ago moved on from working on the Super Meat Boy franchise to creating games like The Binding of Isaac, The End is Nigh, or the recently-released Mewgenics.

So, who’s making Super Meat Boy 3D? Well, one of the original creators, Tommy Refenes, is heavily involved, and working with a surprisingly good fit of a developer in the form of Sluggerfly, who you may recognize from similarly grotesque 3D platformers like Hell Pie or Ben and Ed. On paper, a pretty promising proposition for our sweet little hunk of meat and yes I do hear myself. Let’s see how it turned out.

Now let’s get to the question on everyone’s mind – over 15 years after the release of Super Meat Boy, can adapting its fast, frantic, tightly-paced levels to a 3D format work at the same level of quality? This is going to heavily depend on who you ask, so let’s do a little bit of a compare and contrast.

In the ways that matter to me, Super Meat Boy 3D is a great adaptation of the original. The story remains intact as the mostly minimalist satire on Mario that it always was. The evil Dr. Fetus has once again kidnapped Bandage Girl, and it’s your job to save her by dodging a whole lot of buzzsaws. I say mostly minimalist because the game’s opening and boss levels are bookmarked by brief CGI-animated cutscenes, which are grotesquely cute and thankfully short enough not to get in the way.

The structure of the game itself also remains mostly intact, broken up into five worlds that each have 15 short levels and a boss fight, as well as a set of 15 “dark” world levels in each area that can only be tried if you manage to beat the A+ time on the standard version – often easier said than done. Most levels in the game take 30 seconds or less to complete, and yet are some of the most pulse-pounding, stress-inducing gauntlets of suffering ever imagined in a 3D platformer. In some of the game’s later challenges, the sort of weird groaning, moaning, screaming, and grunting noises I was making as I avoided obstacles by the skin of my balls made me half expect to have my husband walk in and ask me if I was hate-fucking myself. He wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.

This gave new meaning to “meat sweats”. Yes, Super Meat Boy 3D is tough and is in no way for fans of casual platformers. Every level outside of the first handful or so demands breakneck speed, intense focus, and a level of persistence that will make even soulslike fans sweat. And yet unlike a soulslike, a genre I’m less comparing this to and more just roasting a bit, Super Meat Boy 3D maintains the original game’s focus on lightning-fast restarts that bring you back into the fray before you have time to get mad.

When you finally beat a level, you get the joy of watching each of your failed attempts run it again alongside your successful one, unwittingly sacrificing themselves in pools of meaty blood so that the one true meat boy can succeed. Warms the heart.

Meat Boy’s move set gets an upgrade in this iteration, but only to the extent that it helps in his transition to the 3^rd dimension. As always, he can run, jump, and do some bloody, slippery wall-sliding. Supplementing these are new wall-run and dash abilities, the former of which feels like a natural fit given how much wall-hugging Meat Boy has already done in the past, and the latter of which feels like an excellent addition that allows much more control of Meat Boy in a 3D space. That’s about it though – for as hand-numbingly difficult as Super Meat Boy tends to be, the game’s design always prioritized elegance over complexity and that remains the case.

Since I just talked about the move set, I think this is a good time to mention the controls. There may be some reviews releasing at the same time as this one complaining that Meat Boy doesn’t feel great to control in his newfound third dimension. There is light truth to this in the sense that the original Super Meat Boy had such downright perfect controls that it set a high bar, but viewed apart from that, the controls in Super Meat Boy 3D are very solid. But I landed on that conclusion only after changing a few key settings. I’m going to go over them quickly now, so if you’re not interested and just want to get to the good stuff, feel free to skip ahead a minute or so.

The first is in “General” settings, where I turned the Position Helper Line “On”. This creates a dotted line between Meat Boy and the circular position helper on the ground below him, helping massively with depth perception, which isn't a strong suit in difficult 3D platformers with fixed camera angles (looking at you, Crash Bandicoot), so having this option is greatly appreciated. The second setting I changed is under “Accessibility”, where I set the “Always Sprint” toggle to “On”. Super Meat Boy 3D’s levels are designed around going fast, and there was virtually never a situation where I needed to not do that. So holding the right trigger to run throughout every level, and in my case gripping it for dear life like I was holding in the pin of a grenade, was unnecessary. If you want to avoid hand cramps, this setting helps a lot. And the third and final setting is a weird one and it’s under “Controls”. Here, I turned 45-degree snapping to off. With it on by default, Meat Boy’s directional position would lock in 45-degree increments.

This isn’t so bad if you’re trying to maintain momentum in a single direction, but that’s more often not the case in this game, and turning the setting to “Off” made movement feel tighter and have a better flow. I’m not going to pretend that my subjective experience here is the definitive one, but I play a lot of platformers and these are the settings that felt best to me, so I thought I’d share in case some of you boot up Super Meat Boy 3D and think it doesn’t feel that great to play, like I did for my first hour or so.

Enough about that though - let’s talk about arguably the most important piece - the level design. I’m thrilled to say what’s on display here is just about second-to-none in the precision 3D platformer space. The stage layouts here are incredibly smart, using a confident amount of near-constant new ideas at such a pace as to make not a single level feel wasted or redundant. Even the toughest levels have a certain rhythm that, if you can find it, allows you to dance your way through its obstacles like they’re nothing – assuming you can pull off the right moves with near perfection. Dying in Super Meat Boy 3D almost always felt like my fault, with the only exceptions being a couple of levels that seemed a little too trial-and-error-y for my liking – mainly The Forge Master boss fight in world 3, which took 44 attempts and a few years off my life.

Making a return from the original game is bandages to collect within its levels if you’re willing to stray off the beaten path. These are sometimes extremely difficult to get, big surprise, but unlock new characters as you collect more of them so as to remain rewarding but very much optional.

So, has anything changed for the worse from the original game? Eh, not so much, honestly. Again, the controls feel good but not quite as perfectly tight as the original. And arguably, despite the high difficulty that I’ve made no secret of, I would actually consider Super Meat Boy 3D to be slightly easier than the original - especially the final boss which only took me a few tries and felt a bit anticlimactic because of it. Again, the original game’s difficulty is a really high bar to meet, and other than that last boss I wouldn’t say the slightly gentler nature of the game took anything away from it (I considered the original a tad too difficult at times if I’m being controversially honest). The balance of challenges here is more than reasonable if you keep your expectations in check.

Super Meat Boy 3D certainly has less content than the original game. If you hurried your way from the first level to the final boss with a decent amount of platforming skill, you could probably knock that sucker out in about 4 hours. But this doesn’t take into account the full suite of optional Dark World levels, which are much more difficult versions of each base level that are absolutely worth playing, nor does it consider all of the collectible bandages and other secrets that completionists will be sure to hunt for. I haven’t beaten all the Dark World levels yet because doing so in time to meet a review embargo would almost certainly send me to the cardiologist with palpitations, but to say that they at least double the straight-to-the-finish runtime and then some would hardly be a stretch.

Upon beating the final boss, I was hoping for additional levels along the lines of the original game’s Cotton Alley where you’d play as Bandage Girl, but alas, no such levels unlocked unless there’s some other way to do it that I’m not aware of. Let’s frame this critique a little differently though, because let’s be real – when it comes to visuals, Super Meat Boy 3D looks really great. There’s a ton of visual variety in the environments, levels are colorful and full of moving pieces and appropriately brutal obstacles, and it runs quite well, even if the frame rate often goes sub-60 fps on Steam Deck, making a 40-45 fps lock feel more appropriate on that device. Are the game’s colorful visuals a match for the original title’s often muted, industrial color palette? Not really, but sue me, I prefer this by a mile. The music is also pretty good, if nothing I’d write home to mom about.

In the end, there isn’t much to complain about with Super Meat Boy 3D. It’s a hugely faithful reimagining of the original game that gives it a stunning glow-up and plenty of reason to exist on its own. The most hardcore of fans will almost certainly have some bones to pick with it, but for everybody else - when it comes to properly difficult 3D platformers that focus on movement above all else, they rarely make them like this anymore and even more rarely, this well. If you can handle the difficulty, you should not hesitate to pick this one up.

SILVER/GREAT