Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is one of the toughest and, at the same time, fairest platformers ever released, and on Xbox Live Arcade it became a symbol of the entire indie wave. The player controls a living slab of meat setting out to rescue his girlfriend, kidnapped by an evil embryo in a glass jar, and that's essentially all you need to know about the story. Everything else is pure movement skill: running, jumping, and wall-jumping through hundreds of short levels full of buzz saws, salt pools, and rocket-propelled projectiles.

The design of the difficulty is genius. Individual levels last only a few seconds, death is instant, and the restart happens before you can even swear, so momentum and the desire to try again never fade. The controls are utterly precise and predictable; when the player dies, they know it was their own fault, and that exact feeling is what turns frustration into addictiveness. After finishing a level, the game plays back a recording where all your dozens of attempts run at once, and most of them splatter meat all over a saw. Those wanting more will find hidden bandages, dark versions of levels, and unlockable characters from other indie games.

Visually it's a distinctive combination of rough, hand-drawn stylization and clear design, where it's always obvious what's lethal and where you can bounce off. On Xbox 360 the game ran perfectly smoothly, which is a necessity for such a precise platformer. The soundtrack mixes catchy rock and chiptune motifs and manages to keep the mood upbeat even after your fiftieth failure at the same spot. Reviews were enthusiastic, and the game became one of the symbols proving that a small team can compete with major studios. Today, Super Meat Boy is still the benchmark against which all precision platformers are measured. Its main legacy, however, doesn't lie in its difficulty but in the instant restart: thanks to it, a hard game became a fair one, and a whole line of later demanding titles has borrowed this principle as a matter of course.