Super Meat Boy Forever is not the sequel fans waited six years for. It is something stranger: an auto-runner that takes the sharpest platformer of its era and swaps its control scheme for something else entirely.
The game launched in 2020. Wikipedia’s release timeline puts the Nintendo Switch, Windows and Linux versions that year, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One following in 2021 and Android and iOS in 2023. The source platform list names PlayStation 4, Android, PC (Microsoft Windows), iOS, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It began life as a mobile-only version of Super Meat Boy before growing into a full sequel. That origin explains almost everything about it.
Trailer, via Epic Games.
Two Buttons and 7,200 Levels
The control scheme uses two buttons. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl run on their own. The player handles jumping, wall-jumping and the kicks and punches the couple now throw at enemies. Levels are assembled from premade segments, matched to the player’s skill and stitched together on the fly, drawing on a pool of 7,200 handcrafted pieces.
That is a real number, and Team Meat is proud of it. The pitch promises a new challenge every time you play. The reality is more uneven. Random assembly gives the game endless content and no authored rhythm — the carefully tuned escalation that made the original so punishing and so fair. Here, difficulty arrives in whatever order the machine chooses.
The story picks up a few years after the first game. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl are picnicking with their infant daughter Nugget when Dr. Fetus attacks and kidnaps the child. The couple fights through multiple worlds, chasing a villain who keeps escaping or ambushing them.
Manic, Big Slugger and a Squirrel
The boss roster is the strongest argument for the sequel’s existence:
- Manic, a telekinetic brain monster who later switches sides and powers Big Slugger
- Big Slugger, a massive machine taken up by a group of forest animals
- Dr. Fetus’s own lair security system
A squirrel from the picnic forest leads the animals against Fetus. In the finale the squirrel, dying, falls onto a button it mistakes for a self-destruct — and destroys all of time, aging the couple and turning Nugget and Fetus to atoms. The last world, “The Other Side,” sends Meat Ninja and Bandage Ripper after holograms of the two.
It is a bold, bizarre swing. It is also the part of Super Meat Boy Forever that feels most like the studio’s old self: mean, funny, and willing to end a family game with the end of everything.
Ridiculon returns on the soundtrack. The art is sharper, the cutscenes smoother, the animations built frame by frame with obvious care. None of that fixes the central tension. An auto-runner trades precision for momentum, and Super Meat Boy was always a game about precision — about the exact frame you let go of a wall.
Wikipedia notes the game received mixed reviews from critics, and that reading holds up. What does not is dismissing it outright. Seven thousand two hundred levels is not a marketing line; it is a design commitment, and the boss fights are bigger than before. The animals, the time-destroying squirrel, the incel version of Tony Stark that is Dr. Fetus — this is a studio refusing to make the safe sequel.
Super Meat Boy Forever is a lesser game than Super Meat Boy. It is also a braver one, and the risk it takes is the reason it stays in your head after the credits. The auto-runner choice costs it a point or two. The nerve earns most of them back.
7.0/10, per the IGDB critic aggregate across 7 outlets.
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