Thank you to Headup for sending us this game to review!

Super Mario Bros. (SMB), Nintendo’s classic platformer from the 1980s, set the standard for the platformer genre when it was released. Super Meat Boy (SMB) was a tongue-in-cheek platformer satirizing the classic. Originally designed by Edmund McMillen, Super Meat Boy was about Meat Boy, a similarly red-themed hero, on a quest to save his love interest Bandage Girl, another similarly pink-themed damsel, from the evil Dr. Fetus, a literal fetus in a mechanized suit-and-tie. Super Meat Boy set itself apart from Super Mario Bros. with its bizarre fascination with the repulsive like blood, guts, and feces, shared among many of McMillen’s other works such as The Binding of Isaac, The End is Nigh, and Mewgenics. It’s become a calling card for him—a time capsule of the early internet, with Flash games meant to shock that stoked both ire and affection for their controversial content. Meat Boy was a living cube of meat that left trails of blood wherever he went, and who always died in a visceral explosion of blood, a brutal depiction reflecting the game’s brutal difficulty. So, being the first true successor to a title known for its guts and difficulty, how does this game pull off the transition to 3D?

For starters, there are some slight changes to the classic gameplay. The basics like running and jumping are here, with a new dash ability that lets you propel yourself through the air to cross gaps or extend your jumps. SMB let you slide down walls and jump off them, sometimes requiring you to make perfectly-timed wall jumps, while SMB 3D takes this a step further by adding wall-running: you can still sit on walls to slide down them, but now you can keep moving along them to keep your momentum. The expected hazards like lava and sawblades are present, but new obstacles like acid pits, electrically charged panels, wandering enemies, and more add to the platforming challenge. The new level design takes these abilities into consideration and requires you to chain together your movement options to make it across precarious gaps, slide along long stretches of wall, and climb up tall peaks—even incorporating some twisting drops, à la Minecraft dropper challenges. There are also secret levels, one hidden per world, that spoof classic games like Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, and so on. Beating these stages, along with some other challenges, give you different characters you can use instead of Meat Boy, should the mood strike you.

Some players have complained that SMB 3D is an easier game than its predecessor, and I’d tend to agree. SMB’s difficulty focused more on ultra-precise movements and stressing your ability to juggle inputs, while SMB 3D is on average a lot more fair in what it expects from you. Initially, I was breezing through the game and found myself agreeing with those complaints. Once I started aiming to get the A+ times in each stage (times to beat the level under like a par in golf), the game was much harder. If that weren’t enough, there’s also a mirror world known as the Dark World which has alternate, souped-up versions of each level with tons of extra obstacles. To this extent, I think SMB 3D has the perfect difficulty. If you struggle with platformers, you would think the base game is pretty difficult. If you’re more familiar with them, going for A+ completion would make you sweat, as it made me. And if you just really love mastering platformers, or torturing yourself… you can go for A+ times on the Dark World levels too.

Visually, Super Meat Boy 3D is beautiful. Lighting is gorgeous and atmospheric with strong volumetrics and fog in most environments, matching the colors of each world perfectly along with emissive lighting from acid, fires, lava, and other lights creating bright highlights. Models are perfectly detailed and give the vibe of a mid-2010s cartoon, which I adore. Meat Boy's animations and movements are fluid with emotive expressions and squishiness that give great feedback to your controls. Textures fit the art style perfectly, and the materials appear exactly as you expect them to be; with reflective surfaces like glass being shiny, semi-reflective surfaces like metal absorbing the light, and other materials not reflecting much at all. A lot of modern games have struggled with making the materials feel grounded and not plastic-like or excessively shiny, so the game pulling this off is a big plus to me. Animations for enemies or cutscenes like the level victory screens can look unnatural as they appear to lack keyframes, instead being mostly interpolated. Jumping between the pre-rendered cutscenes and the in-game visuals is also jarring as the videos typically end suddenly, cutting off any music and dropping you into levels in an awkward way that made me question if it was an unintended bug.

The environments, enemies, and obstacles you encounter also do a lot to extend off McMillen’s original premise creatively, keeping the fascination with guts, blood, gore, and other crude humor, while introducing a far more colorful and bouncy cartoon art style. His later games have become increasingly muted in color and tone, so while it’s likely not the game he’d have made, SMB 3D’s art style appeals to me a lot. I find it very reminiscent of the Crash Bandicoot N Sane trilogy, except a bit sharper on models and lighting, while lacking in more intricate background level details. The biggest surprise to me is that despite looking very crisp and pretty, the game runs well, too. A lot of game devs have received an increasing amount of hate for using Unreal Engine 5, as it has a reputation for making generic looking games, introducing stuttering, and performing terribly. To that end, I was shocked when I reached the credits and saw SMB 3D was indeed built on UE5, yet somehow escaped most of its pitfalls.

I often find sound to be equally as important as graphics, so I’m glad to report that the team has done great here too. When Meat Boy walks around, he makes plopping noises; when jumping or landing, his body makes a slapping noise; when sliding down a wall, he sounds like wet sandpaper; when he dies to a saw or blade, he explodes into a burst of blood that sounds like dropping a watermelon. This even goes beyond Meat Boy’s movement noises, as things like his death noise or menu buttons and other interactions have wet, sopping aspects to them. The sound effects themselves are well-mixed and of a high quality, and fit so naturally into the game that they start to fade into the background to create an immersive, cohesive experience. The only disappointment would be the soundtrack, which is just okay. It’s made up of well-produced but generic rock tracks with synth backings that serve as mood-setting motivation to keep you going through tough levels, but don’t stand out or elevate the experience.

Platformers typically focus on responsive controls, especially in more intense games like the original SMB. Changing the formula to a 3D platformer while keeping that difficulty meant it was especially important for SMB 3D to stick the landing, and I think the game did this well enough. Though I have had some issues with inputs not responding when jumping off certain walls, Meat Boy is otherwise quick to respond to inputs and doesn’t lose responsiveness in the air, with the dash being useful mid-air for quick movement adjustments for skilled jumps or tricks. Without using the dash, however, Meat Boy can be a bit slow in the air, and the dash can sometimes cause you to overshoot your target as it seems locked to the eight cardinal and intercardinal positions. This was particularly annoying during the third world’s boss fight which worked similarly to an auto-runner in 2D games, but it wasn’t a true auto-runner, and you had to keep Meat Boy moving while also making tight, mid-air adjustments while the boss chased and attacked you. The game only took me 6-7 hours to complete with 100% Light World A+ times, but this boss alone took me over an hour. Others have raised similar complaints about controls, with some noting that it can be hard to visually keep track of Meat Boy while moving or figure out where to go next in levels the first time you're playing them, but I didn’t really have that issue.

Morally, as you might have surmised from the above, SMB 3D is a game filled with disturbing content. Intense blood is present throughout the game, as well as some strong violence and gore, as Meat Boy can be graphically dismembered or otherwise harmed by obstacles and enemies. There was no sexual content or language present, as far as I saw. Some crude humor is in the game, such as the Dark World being accessed through a portal opened by two tentacles that spread it apart, and some enemies eating and expelling you out the other end.

Overall, Super Meat Boy 3D is an impressive 3D platformer with great visuals, solid gameplay, and fun sound design all accentuating its love for its bloody aesthetic, let down by some input issues and a middling soundtrack. If you were a fan of the original, interested in the series, or just love platformers, I can highly recommend this game.