Super Meat Boy 3D Is A Messy Attempt At Going 3D

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Super Meat Boy is famous for being a very challenging, precise platformer. The popular 2010 game, where you control a piece of meat, became well-known partly because it acknowledged how hard it was. It showed you replays of all your failed attempts after you finally beat a level. I was interested to see if that same precise gameplay would work in a 3D platformer, but after trying a demo, it doesn’t seem to translate very well.

The demo showed the beginning of the game, starting with tutorials and moving into levels filled with traps and obstacles. Thankfully, Meat Boy 3D gets the core gameplay of a Super Meat Boy game right. You play as a bloody, squishy character running through dangerous levels to rescue your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the villainous Dr. Fetus. You reach Bandage Girl at the end of each level, but Dr. Fetus always takes her to the next one. Afterwards, you see a replay of all your attempts, showing multiple Meat Boys racing ahead and most of them failing, which nicely summarizes your run. The game’s quirky humor is familiar, and it even includes a nod to Super Mario Bros. with a playful warp pipe reference.

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Although the game offers complete 3D movement, the initial levels I tested felt best played by moving in just eight directions. Like previous Super Meat Boy games, the focus is on speedrunning—the tutorial quickly teaches you to use the dash button, which is essential for most jumps. For the most part, you’ll be moving in straight lines or diagonally. This likely simplifies things at the start, making the levels easier to understand and preventing players from being overwhelmed with too much freedom before they’re comfortable with the controls.

However, the level design doesn’t quite work as well. The environments are often cluttered with lots of plants and overgrown areas. Later stages take you to dark, rusty sewers. The original *Super Meat Boy* was fast-paced and challenging, but the simple, clear level designs let you quickly understand what was ahead. *Super Meat Boy 3D*’s environments, on the other hand, are often visually confusing, making it easy to accidentally run into traps. While the game is meant to be difficult and require learning through trial and error, many deaths feel unfair because hazards are hard to see, and you might die repeatedly to the same hidden trap.

One issue is that controlling Meat Boy feels a bit slippery and inaccurate. I’m torn about this because the original *Super Meat Boy* also had light, airy movement, letting you adjust in the air for difficult jumps. However, that same approach doesn’t work as well in this new version, which offers much more freedom of movement. It seems the 3D version stuck too closely to the original’s controls instead of adapting to the new 3D environment. A new wall-running ability was added, which seemed like a good fit, but I couldn’t consistently combine it with regular jumps, and it ended up feeling just as floaty and imprecise as the rest of the movement.

Super Meat Boy 3D is most enjoyable when it feels like a classic 2D game. The camera usually follows the action like a traditional sidescroller, moving with Super Meat Boy and occasionally dipping into the 3D space. There are sections where you run forward and jump between obstacles, effectively recreating the original game’s platforming challenges within a 3D world. Thankfully, the gameplay remains similar to the 2D version, which is a good thing.

Super Meat Boy 3D is currently scheduled to come out in 2026, giving the developers plenty of time to improve the game. If they can refine the 3D gameplay to match the quality of the original 2D game, it could be fantastic. Right now, however, it’s still a bit rough around the edges, much like the game’s namesake.

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2025-10-17 18:09