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.