Meat Boy is a little intelligent meat cube. He adores Bandage Girl, a girl composed of bandages, and Bandage Girl adores Meat Boy. Nobody loves Dr. Fetus, a fetus in a jar dressed in a tuxedo, so Dr. Fetus despises everyone…especially Meat Boy. Dr. Fetus decides to kidnap Bandage Girl, so Meat Boy must pursue and rescue her! Is he evil enough to save his girlfriend?
Super Meat Boy is a fast-paced platformer based on the previous online Flash game Meat Boy. Meat Boy’s only powers are running, wall jumping, and dying. He will die a lot because the game’s defining element is its difficulty. To compensate, each stage is short – sometimes only a few seconds, up to a minute – and upon death, the player is quickly restored to the beginning for another attempt. If Meat Boy succeeds in approaching Bandage Girl, she is whisked away by Dr. Fetus once more, and the player advances to the next stage. After completing the steps in each chapter, the player can face the area’s boss, who must be defeated to go to the next chapter.
Over 300 stages are spread throughout seven chapters, featuring retro-style bonus stages, boss stages, and even higher-difficulty variants of every standard step. The Xbox 360 version also features a chapter called “The Internets,” where developers can regularly release new level packs for free.
There are also over a dozen playable characters from previous indie games, like Tim from Braid, the Alien Hominid, and Gish. Characters are unlocked by collecting bandages in several of the game’s levels or playing retro bonus segments hidden within the main stages. Each game version has a somewhat different list of unlockable characters.
The player’s best times for each stage are recorded and published on a global leaderboard. In addition, after completing a set, a replay is displayed that shows every attempt made by the player and can be stored.
