Super Meat Boy Forever review – a gristly challenge – The Guardian

The pain and the enjoyment of platformers such as this is their accuracy: the controls must be so tight, the leaping and running so perfectly foreseeable, that your failures are constantly your own. In Super Meat Boy Forever, though, enemies can turn up in especially unjust places, and the architecture of the levels in some cases feels thrown up rather than thoroughly positioned by human hand. Its problem feels vindictive rather than spirited, and oddly soulless, like attempting to beat a computer at chess. For all its obstacles, it felt as if I could feel the developers cheering me through the original Super Meat Boys death chambers, ready me onwards. Here, the algorithm is coldly indifferent to your efforts, and, in spite of the unique art and quirky ambiance, the video game is a punishing onslaught thats unworthy running.

We d take turns tossing ourselves at the most current agonizing plan of spinning blades, lava, rockets and near-impossible wall jumps until we couldnt take it any more, passing the pad around till somebody lastly made it one level further. Its one of the most difficult video games Ive ever played, and yet I remember it so fondly– I can still summon the precise designs of especially vicious levels, and the rush I felt on dominating them.
Super Meat Boy Forever was originally developed as a smartphone-friendly version of the original, but gradually it evolved into a follow up. This time Meat Boy (or Bandage Girl, the damsel raised this time around to a player character) moves under their own unstoppable momentum, and our job is to jump and rush at the ideal time. The levels are now randomly created, with opponents and designs that remix themselves each time you begin a new video game. In theory this makes it definitely replayable, a fount of continuous, unpredictable obstacle– however it loses so much in the transition that I didnt feel like returning to it.