It's So Nice to 'Meat' You: 'Super Meat Boy' Rocks

“Super Meat Boy” hurt my feelings and my hands, but just like any abusive relationship, I kept going right back to it.

Addictive is a simpler way to put it, but that really doesn’t adequately describe the sheer difficulty at hand. I’ve played a lot of video games in my day, but “Super Meat Boy” might just take the cake. And yet, it still rocked.

The plot doesn’t matter at all in “Super Meat Boy,” but the game is obviously aware of this fact. You play as Meat Boy, an anthropomorphic cube of meat who has to save his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the clutches of Dr. Fetus, a fetus in a robot suit wearing a tuxedo. Yep.

That complicated, intricately-woven plot doesn’t extend far beyond the opening cutscene though. The rest of the game is a brutal homage to the old Nintendo classics, with every new world beginning with a parody of favorite oldies like “Street Fighter II” and “Castlevania.”

Nothing in “Super Meat Boy” is taken seriously at all, with the notable exception of the gameplay.

Meat Boy can walk, run, jump and leap off of walls, and that’s it. Think Mario without crazy raccoon hats or fire flowers. The goal in each level is simple: get to Bandage Girl. But that’s nowhere near as easy as it sounds.

Saw blades, bottomless pits, homing missiles, more saw blades and homing demon mouths that explode into ten more demon mouths, among other dangers, will stand in your way, each level crazier than the last.

Often, levels are so initially mind-boggling that when you first see them it’s easy to just sit there and think, “how is this even possible?” But for the most part, they only take a few minutes each. In some cases, they can take a couple hours.

And if you get “Super Meat Boy,” you won’t run out of stuff to do anytime soon. There are over 300 levels in the game with the promise of more to come, extra characters to unlock, and bandages tucked away in the dark corners of many levels.

In short, if you have $15 and want to get the most bang from your buck, buy “Super Meat Boy” immediately. It can be pretty ridiculously hard sometimes, but it’s really a nice game when you get to know it. You just have to give it a chance.

4.5 out of 5 stars