Super Meat Boy

People have been calling Super Meat Boy ‘one of the hardest games ever made’. Over at GamestyleOne of the most underrated videogame blogging sites around, Bradley Marsh described it as “a game made by sadists, for masochists”.

With all due respect to Bradley, and to everyone else who has been focusing on the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, you’re wrong.

There’s no sadism involved. This isn’t a game designed to punish you. It’s not a game like Trials HD, where the pieces have been placed in an clever, but nearly-random order and you have to forcibly wrench a victory from the game, like taking a gun from Charlton Heston’s cold, dead hands. Super Meat Boy has been designed by geniuses. I haven’t finished it yet (I’m still stuck in the post-Halloween glut of gaming), but every single level I have played so far has been designed within an inch of its life so that there is one completely perfect run-through that can be achieved in the minimum amount of time, usually just a few seconds. It’s when you dawdle that the game gets difficult. In other words, if you aren’t playing this game with the ‘run’ button permanently held down, then you’re not playing it properly.

Finding this perfect path through the level is tricky, and for the most part, it’s a matter of trial-and-error. But at least the game is smart enough to have almost no loading times so that when you die, you instantly restart the level. Frustration never gets a foothold. And when you finally do succeed and finish the level, you’re treated to a replay, showing all of your attempts to beat the level simultaneously, a glorious jamboree of death and failure and eventual triumph.

One thing though, no-one is wrong about how good this game is. Easily the best platform game I’ve played in years. I can’t recommend it enough.