Super Meat Boy Forever
Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Boy, does it feel good to have the skinless wonder back under the thumbs. He patters and smacks through levels, up walls and over band saws with the same satisfying heft as ever. Little wonder: original Super Meat Boy programmer Tommy Refenes is creating this sequel, preserving everything that makes Meat Boy, well, Meat Boy. Weighty physics, tight controls, instant respawns, gory splatter trails – it’s all still here. Quite the feat, considering so much has changed.
Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen is no longer involved. This started life as an iPhone title. It only uses two buttons. And, technically, it’s a runner. Not an endless runner – often associated with mechanical compromise and microtransactions – but a game that automatically moves its hero from left to right. Many instantly turned up their noses at this mobile-friendly, seemingly much diminished Meat Boy. “We’re still getting over the stigma, because we named it Forever,” admits Refenes, laughing. “It’s called Forever for a different reason.”
Namely, the dynamically constructed levels. Each is made up of around 40 to 50 potential level chunks. Exiting to the menu and reloading the stage triggers a reshuffle, with obstacles, walls and enemies changing. Replaying a finished level, meanwhile, ramps up its difficulty. “We design all those minilevels and give them what we call a cadence,” Refenes says. “You don’t want a linear increase in difficulty, you want to give the player some rests. So we assign all of the chunks we make a numerical value across four difficulty levels, and have these cadence strings for each.” With fewer, but longer, levels, the regenerating format seemed a natural fit – and you can play, conceivably, forever.