Super Meat Boy 3D Is A Messy Attempt At Going 3D

Super Meat Boy is the poster child for tough-as-nails precision platforming. The 2010 2D platformer starring a slab of meat was a viral hit in part because the game knew how difficult it was, and emphasized your repeated deaths by showing you each of them simultaneously once you finally completed a level. I’ve been curious to see how that 2D precision would translate into the realm of a 3D platformer. Unfortunately, based on a brief gameplay demo, the answer is: not very well.

My demo covered the earliest stages of the game, from a handful of tutorials through a few longer levels covered with traps and hazards. And to its credit, Meat Boy 3D nails the fundamentals of what you would expect from a Super Meat Boy game. You’re once again a squishy, squelchy slab of unidentified, bloody meat, running through hazard-filled stages to save your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the evil Dr. Fetus. At the end of every stage, you reach Bandage Girl, only to have Dr. Fetus snatch her away to the next stage. Then you get to watch a replay simultaneously showing your every attempt, with many Meat Boys scrambling ahead and all but one of them meeting their grisly doom, summarizing your journey through the stage. The irreverent humor is all very recognizable, even including a little warp pipe gag to reference Meat Boy’s Super Mario Bros. inspirations.

While you have full 3D control, in the early stages I played, the layouts lent themselves to the eight cardinal directions. Like its predecessors, Super Meat Boy 3D is focused on pushing you to move through levels as fast as possible–the tutorials introduce the dash button early, and you can’t really get enough momentum for most jumps without it–and you’re mostly going in straight lines or diagonals. Presumably this is to keep these early stages easily readable and to avoid overwhelming the player with too much freedom of movement before they really get a feel for it.

But it’s not enough. To start, these environments are remarkably busy, with overgrown brush, vines, and grass. Later levels ventured into dank sewers full of rust-colored pipes and scaffolding. The original Super Meat Boy could get away with its lightning-quick pace and unforgiving hazards because the stage designs themselves were minimalistic and easy to read at a glance. Super Meat Boy 3D’s environments, by comparison, tend to blend together, making it too easy to run straight into a hazard before you recognize that it even is one. And while part of the Super Meat Boy experience is learning-by-dying, these deaths feel like they aren’t your fault–especially since you might suffer the exact same death, repeatedly, from a trap that just isn’t easily visible.

It doesn’t help that the movement of Meat Boy itself feels floaty and imprecise. On this point I have mixed feelings, because when I go back to the original Super Meat Boy, the movement in that game is similarly light, with lots of capability to steer Meat Boy in mid-air to make tough jumps and tight landings. But with so much more freedom of movement, that same approach doesn’t work as well here. This is one area where the 3D conversion may have hewed too closely to the original source material, rather than adapting to the demands of a 3D space. The major new addition to Meat Boy’s move set is a wall run, a novel addition that would seem to fit right in with the rest of his moves, but I never quite got down how to properly chain it with regular jumps, so it too suffered from feeling too floaty and imprecise.

The moments when Super Meat Boy 3D works best, strangely, are when it functionally is not behaving as if it’s a 3D game at all. The camera generally behaves like a traditional 2D sidescroller, tracking Super Meat Boy’s movements from side to side and sometimes downward into the 3D planes. Sometimes a section of a stage will have you run straight forward, leap up a wall, and then jump between spinning blades, and those moments essentially just recreate the original Super Meat Boy platforming within a 3D environment. Mechanically, it behaves like the 2D version, and that’s for the better.

Super Meat Boy 3D is slated for release in 2026, so there’s time for the developer to polish and fine-tune the gameplay. If this 3D game can be tweaked enough to feel as good as the classic 2D platformer, Team Meat may once again have something special on their hands. For now, though, it’s just as messy as Meat Boy himself.