Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is pure distilled essence of the tough platformer: you play a cube of raw meat fighting its way through hundreds of short, lethally dangerous levels to rescue its girlfriend Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus. Individual levels take only a few seconds on a good run, but you'll die a hundred times before you get there. The game doesn't hide this fact at all — quite the opposite: after completing a level, it plays back a replay showing all your previous attempts pouring across the screen at once, turning mass death into both a joke and a reward.

The controls are precise to a surgical degree. Meat Boy bounces off walls, slides along them, accelerates while sprinting, and everything responds instantly. When you die, the restart comes in a flash with no loading, which keeps up the pace of constant retrying. This very loop of attempt, death, and instant restart became the template for an entire later wave of tough platformers. The level design progresses from simple jumps to contraptions made of circular saws, rocket missiles, and crumbling platforms, and the game regularly introduces new elements without ever resorting to a lengthy tutorial. Bonus worlds and unlockable characters from other independent games were also a nice tribute to the indie scene of the time.

On PC, the title runs smoothly even on very weak machines and offers crisp control with both keyboard and gamepad, though the gamepad turns out to be the most comfortable choice. Visually, the game relies on roughly drawn, comic-book-dark humor, and the music accompanies the action with an energetic rock backdrop that manages to keep the mood up even after your fiftieth failed attempt. After release, Super Meat Boy became one of the symbols of independent game development, and thanks to the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, plenty of people who never played it still know about it. Today it still feels fresh: it's short, tough, fair, and remains one of the best examples of what a platformer built purely on the quality of movement should look like.