Super Meat Boy 3D has no vibe

SHAUN PRESCOTT, AUSTRALIAN EDITOR

(Image credit: Future)

This week: In addition to playing through Super Meat Boy 3D, Shaun is also playing the new game by the creators of Chasm, and something else that's still a bit secret.

Super Meat Boy can take all the credit for rekindling my love for the action platformer. I bought a secondhand Xbox 360 in 2010 just to play it. In that era of cinematic brown shooters it was a welcome reminder that Hollywood gravitas and exorbitant polygon counts are surplus to requirement when what this medium really excels at is making you pull off extraordinary, often ridiculous technical feats with your fingers.

Since then the classic 2D platformer has flourished to the extent that Super Meat Boy, despite still being really good, isn't something I think much about anymore. I played a bit of the autorunner Super Meat Boy Forever but bounced off it because I don't like autorunners, and while Super Meat Boy 3D is mostly pretty fun, I'm not enamoured with it either.

Not much has changed in the move to 3D. Meat Boy has a jump that can be tight or hugely extended depending on momentum and the duration of your button press. He can wall run and dash. He makes a disgusting squelching sound when he's killed, by dint of being raw meat. He leaves blood trails. There are deadly saws and spikes galore. The objective is to get to Bandage Girl at the end of each level, where she's invariably stolen anew by Dr. Fetus.

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Super Meat Boy 3D has a load of niggling problems that are overshadowed by one huge existential problem: Super Meat Boy 3D looks bad. It doesn't look ugly in the charming, deliberate way Super Meat Boy did. That old 2D platformer had a rugged visual identity that mixed excessive gore with 1990s cartoon whimsy and a modern, jagged take on pixel art that is still immediately recognisable. It looked kinda like the evil game you might accidentally encounter when shoving an NES cart in the wrong way around. It probably would have caused a moral panic in the '80s.

(Image credit: Team Meat)

On the other hand, Super Meat Boy 3D just looks like a run-of-the-mill 3D platformer, albeit with a bit more blood than usual. Meat Boy himself triggers that same rush of familiarity that most mascots do—the one most people mistake for fondness—and sure, the CG cutscenes are kinda charming, but otherwise Super Meat Boy 3D lacks that scribbly weirdness, that canny approach to apocalyptic color, that made the first game so distinctive.

Edmund McMillen's absence is probably to blame for this: Mewgenics looks more like Super Meat Boy than Super Meat Boy 3D does, and I reckon the first world in Super Meat Boy 3D would feel just as much at home in that recent Smurfs 3D platformer as it does here. Meanwhile, McMillen's earlier collaboration with Tyler Glaiel, The End is Nigh, looks more like Super Meat Boy than Super Meat Boy 3D does.

It belongs to a modern vibe-less canon for which Fortnite is the visual trailblazer.

Super Meat Boy's levels were often illogically designed and completely subservient to what felt good, but there was still a dim kind of clarity to its threadbare worldbuilding: it was obvious that we were navigating a long-collapsed hellscape. It didn't necessarily matter that panoramic urban vistas were supplanted by subterranean lava worlds from one level to the next, because all were of a piece with the game's zany, often puerile take on apocalypse.

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In the new SMB, I don't really know what kind of spaces I'm meant to be inhabiting. Sure, there are general themes—green world, hi-tech world, lava world, etcetera—but the levels themselves often feel like the kind of user-made challenge map you'd find for Quake, or Garry's Mod, or something, expressly designed for gitting gud in, with basically no convincing conceptual decor.

I mean… maybe it's just me but this has to be the ugliest combination of colours I've seen in a game since yesterday, when I scrolled through endless reams of Steam shovelware for my weekly column:

(Image credit: Team Meat)

...and this is exceptionally over busy:

(Image credit: Team Meat)

Compare that to the average Super Meat Boy map. The color palettes are lovely in a yuck kind of way, and deliberately muted to avoid that quality completely anathema to precision platformers: excessive, distracting visual noise.

Super Meat Boy 3D has no vibe. It belongs to a modern vibe-less canon for which Fortnite is the visual trailblazer. It's cloaked in a shiny, brazenly colorful aesthetic whose inspiration is both the crowdpleasing Pixar films of yore and tacky free-to-play phone games. You see it everywhere, but most overwhelmingly in aborted live-service games and, well, Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It's an astonishingly weird art style for a niche masocore platformer to be dressed in, and it feels very at odds with the original game's style.

While the game lacks visual flair Team Meat has, at least, done a good job transferring the precision-oriented feel of Super Meat Boy into a 3D format. He feels just like he did in the older game, though some levels lean annoyingly in the direction of trial and error, especially when rapid directional shifts are required. The boss of the third world is a real POS in this regard, and also highlights another weird quirk in SMB 3D's design: by default the game has 45 degree snapping toggled on. You should probably turn this off straight away and learn to play without it, because it can cause a major headache later in the game.

SMB 3D feels good in the hands but by the fourth world I started to lose interest, mainly because I didn't care what kind of world theme I would miss out on if I gave up. For your average completionist platforming sicko that probably won't matter so much, because this is still, despite everything, a very competent action game. It's just a shame that it's also a very ugly one—and not a good, interesting ugly.