The Mess of Super Meat Boy

By now it’s clear that Team Meat’s upcoming Super Meat Boy will be a rallying point for indie platforming. Tim from Braid, Commander Video from the Bit.Trip games, Hominid from Alien Hominid, Flywrench from Flywrench, Meat Boy himself — these DIY heroes star in the hardcore platformer and make their case for the expressive value of 2D run-and-jump.

I’m encouraged by the thought of indie creators finding common ground and strength in numbers. But what most strikes me about my Independent Games Festival build of Super Meat Boy (it has been nominated for both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Audio) is the game’s skillful, almost offhand commentary on the masochistic nature of platforming. Meat Boy’s mechanics are instantly familiar to any Mario or Sonic devotee — run to build momentum; jump for your life; avoid spikes. You are certain to fail, and die, dozens of times in your quest for the princess. Super Meat Boy portrays this nearly Sisyphean task as a lengthy series of short, pithy levels in which Meat Boy or others scrape through thick and thin to grab the princess at the other end, only to have her taken away and placed out of reach once again in the next level.

The past in the present.

Upon completion, you have the option to replay your playthrough of the level. But it’s telling that your failures are ultimately as memorable as your successes. The former are recorded by the game just as clearly as the latter: Meat Boy drips (naturally) blood at every step, and his fateful path from platform to platform to killer bank of razor blades is painted in bright, messy red. The more tries he takes, the bloodier the level becomes.

Compare Super Meat Boy and Super Mario World. The plumber’s world is one of rounded edges, soft landings, wide eyes. Meat Boy’s is full of blades, splatter, and clenched teeth. By the time you hit the flag at the end of one of Super Mario World‘s more stressful levels, what you feel is that you’ve really done it right. Your missed landings, your tumbles into oblivion, your failed attempts? They left no visible trace; they’re as good as nonexistent. In a normal platformer like Super Mario World, your mistakes are swept under the rug. If you’re doing it right, you’ll be filling the hero’s shoes, never missing a step.

It’s easy, then, to consider Meat Boy a platforming antihero. Even his most balletic movements end up a smear. There’s no clean dash to the exit. Even such an innocuous movement as jumping across a gap, narrowly missing the ledge on the other side, and drifting down to the ground leaves a long, bloody trail against the side of the cliff. Frustration is written on Meat Boy’s face.

The joy of falling?

Meat Boy’s fluids also impart a fresh, wounded physicality to the terrain of the platformer. This isn’t just a fantastical landscape of vertiginous canyons and saw blades. It’s a highly subjective one, on which your anxieties and attempts to overcome slim odds are automatically written. With a few exceptions (the retro-themed, certifiably awesome warp levels), you don’t lose lives in Meat Boy. You have infinite chances to try, try again. Instead of the standard cycle of death and reincarnation, you live in a perpetual state of woundedness. Subtext aside, what this suggests is that Super Meat Boy is less about perfecting your performance (here, a fluke is as good as seasoned skill) than about being able to experience the game in full, to see and read all that the game has to say.

The game doesn’t take too many gallons of blood to make its mark. The whirring, razor-sharp saw blades everywhere drive the pain home. Games like this, from Yoshi’s Island to ‘Splosion Man, cut a very fine line between the exhilaration of living and the drudgery of repetition.

Advertisement