Super Meat Boy was a hit indie platformer, landing in 2010 on PC and exploding onto other platforms over the years. It has a few side games, most of which have their own small audiences, including one that riffs on Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. In 2025 a short teaser was show for Super Meat Boy 3D, imagining everybody’s favourite meat slab as a stocky, meaty 3D chunk. Now released in 2026, Super Meat Boy 3D has done decently well, but split fans in some ways. Can it live up to its legacy with a stellar flavour, or is this a failed dry-aging experiment?
Join Meat Boy as he strikes out to save his girlfriend Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Foetus. This might sound familiar, and that is because it almost beat for beat is the first Super Meat Boy again for the majority of the experience. This isn’t bad; it is just a framing method to give players something to aim towards while dying over and over in various meat factories. It might have been nice to have something a little more coherent, but it was far from necessary. Although, the end level freeze frames have Dr. Foetus kicking Bandage Girl as well, which seems odd; it would make sense with the end level screen if he always hit Meat Boy himself, but that is by the by.
Gameplay is the core focus of the game and, boy, it is an interesting experience. Translating Meat Boy to 3D can’t have been an easy task, and yet what Team Meat and Sluggerfly have created feels pretty good to play, and only has a few negative points worth mentioning. Movement is fast and snappy with some really good physics. It all evokes the same feeling as its 2D counterpart, but requires different lateral thinking.
Bouncing both away from and towards the screen is surprisingly slick and easy to judge, with the obvious caveat that sometimes a platform or surface is either further away or closer than it appears. It adds a sense of speed that the 2D games don’t necessarily have while retaining the same sort of design methodology. Meat Boy retains his wall jumping, sliding, and now even has wall running. This is combined with general movement, double jumping, and dashing, resulting in versatile base gameplay.
Visually things also look pretty nice. Outside of a few janky animations, the overall colour palette and readability is good. Where it struggles is consistency and clarity. For some reason the Switch 2 version of this game is very soft looking. It has unstable edges on objects and even has an optional anti-aliasing setting that makes little difference. There are also some pretty severe performance drops in busier stages, so while they look pretty they also struggle to remain playable at the level the game expects.
Cutscenes look rather good, though, even if there isn’t much of a story, and tend to introduce players to the shifting environments in the main adventure mode. There is also a great deal of excellent music to thematically support the levels that is really good at providing atmospheric pacing and calls to mind the themes of the other Meat Boy games. However, some of the sound effects are seemingly out of sync, which is a shame as they are relatively satisfying.
