The precise platforming series is sloppier in 3D
Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t the Mario 64 moment the series needs
After over 15 years of putting players through punishing trials, the Super Meat Boy series is finally up against a fierce challenge of its own design: shifting to 3D. Super Meat Boy 3D looks to evolve an influential indie classic by convincingly adapting its ultraprecise 2D platforming into a 3D game that’s every bit as brutal. It’s a sensible, if overdue, direction for the series to run in, but like a Super Meat Boy level, it’s not a feat you’re likely to pull off on your first try.
Though it knows the marks it needs to hit, Super Meat Boy 3D struggles with execution. Developed by Sluggerfly and Team Meat (though once again minus series co-creator Edward McMillen, who quietly split from the studio a decade ago while working on Mewgenics), the latest installment is a sloppier platformer than its 2D counterparts. Loose movement and restrictive camerawork drop an added layer of unanticipated challenge on an already tough platformer. What could have been a moment for reinvention instead feels like the series confidently jumping head-first into the same meat grinder.
Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t hiding anything about its elevator pitch: it’s a new Super Meat Boy game, but in 3D this time. Strip away the perspective shift and you have the same fundamental game that helped usher in the indie game revolution in 2010. Playing as the same pint-sized meatball man, you make your way through a series of deadly platforming gauntlets in pursuit of the dastardly Dr. Fetus. There’s no combat. Your only weapon is patience as you run and jump around hellish death traps filled with buzzsaws, spikes, and other deadly tricks that will instantly turn you into a red splat upon contact.
Everything that made the original Super Meat Boy work as a bit of genre satire holds true in 3D. When you play a game like Super Mario Bros., you’re bound to die a lot. You’re also not meant to give that too much thought. Mario always returns to life seconds later, as peppy as ever. Super Meat Boy lampooned that by making you treat each failure like a digital murder. Blood trails from your fallen brethren paint the surfaces and an end-of-level replay shows every single one of your deaths play out at once. It rubbed your face in all that red goop like a dog, turning the game itself into the supervillain you felt driven to defeat. Super Meat Boy 3D proudly carries that antagonistic streak forward even if it doesn’t add much to the conversation besides wiseass loading screen hints that urge you to get good. It’s 2026, but here, it’s still 2010.
The basics still land, for the most part. Each level across its five main worlds (and their harder dark world variants) is a precisely designed American Ninja Warrior obstacle course. Not a trap is out of place as Team Meat and Sluggerfly fill each stage with delightfully cruel gotcha moments meant to catch you off guard right as you’ve built up your confidence. Sometimes I would lock in during a level and get all the way to the end only for a set of spikes to pop out of the wall where I was least expecting them. The thrill comes when repeated trial and error results in gradual gains, until you’re suddenly able to conquer a level you’ve been bashing your head against in 20 seconds flat.
The jump to 3D also gives the developers room to play with a ton of new platforming tricks right through the end of the game. Bounding off criss-crossing train cars or timing your jumps just right to dance around electrified platforms brings Super Meat Boy’s straightforward platforming more in line with Nintendo’s inventive design philosophies. Not every gimmick works — especially a late-game one that toys with gravity — but Super Meat Boy 3D doesn’t stick on one idea for long, and you don’t need to beat all 15 of a world’s levels to unlock the boss. It’s a surprising bit of forgiveness for a series that despises you.
Physically navigating those worlds is another story. Meat Boy has a simple set of moves beyond his sprint and jumps, like an air dash and an infinite wall jump. You can move far and freely with those tools because the movement is very loose compared to the precise 2D games. It feels custom-built for speedrunners who want to find exploits, allowing players to skip entire sections of a level with a well-timed jump sequence. The side effect of that is that Meat Boy feels more unwieldy and unpredictable in 3D. It’s harder to nail down pixel-perfect jumps when you’re butting up against unexpected physics quirks that you need to learn and account for in each level.
Everything about Super Meat Boy 3D is messy compared to the scientific precision of the series’ 2D games.
That would be a fine compromise if you weren’t wrestling with other annoyances. The fixed camera angles make it difficult to gauge depth of field in levels. I had plenty of levels where I needed to wall jump from a flat surface around an obstacle, but camera placement made it difficult to judge where I was in 3D space. Other times I’d attempt to land on a platform against a wall only to fall through a tiny gap hidden by the camera angle. That’s also complicated by the fact that Meat Boy is very small on screen, so it’s easy to lose track of him in busy levels where lots of machinery is spinning in the distance. Bugs compound that further; I had plenty of cases where I somehow lodged myself inside a wall. (The game’s dedicated suicide button sure came in handy there.)
You can throw in a strange difficulty curve on top of that. Levels wildly oscillate between easy and impossible with little sense of naturally mounting challenge. Its first boss stage, a long auto-scrolling chase scene, is one of its hardest levels, while its fourth boss took me a few attempts to piece together an 11-second victory. Everything about Super Meat Boy 3D is messy compared to the scientific precision of the series’ 2D games.
I’d be more willing to live with the warts if they were the side effects of experimentation, but they aren’t — and that’s what ultimately disappoints me about the project. Moving a video game series from 2D to 3D is an exciting moment, historically. It’s not just a matter of switching the perspective or buffing up the visuals; it’s an opportunity to reinvent. Super Mario 64 isn’t revered as a classic because it faithfully reworked Super Mario Bros. 3’s structure into 3D. It allowed Nintendo to make Mario’s moveset more expressive, find new level goals that went beyond running from left to right, and build more creative play spaces that embraced verticality. No 3D Mario game since has taken that freedom for granted, constantly rethinking how Mario can interact with his worlds. That pivot point can turn fun games into empires.
Super Meat Boy 3D chooses to play it safe instead, which is surprising for a series that’s all about confronting risk. It’s too comfortable following the same formula and treating the extra dimension as a new gimmick rather than an opportunity. I find myself less excited by it than I was the poorly received Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine, a spinoff game that detoured from platforming to create an evil riff on Puyo Puyo instead. For all its problems, there was a vision I could see: What would it look like if we applied the design fundamentals of Super Meat Boy to an entirely different genre? That’s a fun thought experiment that furthers the series’ meta commentary on game design. Super Meat Boy 3D makes me feel like the series has run out of questions to ask, and that’s a dangerous creative place to be stuck in — like getting trapped between two buzzsaws closing in on one another.
For those who just want a classic Super Meat Boy game with a novel concept, Super Meat Boy 3D fills that craving decently enough. There are lots of dastardly new traps, hidden bandages to find in each level, A+ completion times to chase, and even secret levels to hunt down. It’s a robust rage machine for the kind of masochist who welcomes the pain. But as a continued conversation with the platformers that inspired the series, it misses a step in the jump to 3D. And we all know what happens when you miss a step in Super Meat Boy. Splat. Try again.
Super Meat Boy 3D will be released March 31 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by Headup. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.