Super Meat Boy Die Instantly, Retry Faster

Meat Boy can run and jump, and that is nearly the whole moveset: wall jumps carry him up shafts, and momentum makes him slide. The design takes the old school difficulty of NES-era platformers and cuts everything else away. Levels last seconds to a couple of minutes, any touch of a saw or spike kills you instantly, and you respawn immediately, so failure never costs you more than a breath. You clear a gap by a pixel, land on a moving saw blade, and the next screen is already trying to kill you. The controls are tight enough that when you die, and you will die a lot, the fault is entirely yours. That is exactly why finally beating a level feels so good.

The story is simple and ridiculous: Meat Boy chases his girlfriend, made of bandages, through the traps of an evil fetus in a tuxedo. The chase runs through over 300 levels across 5+ chapters, from haunted hospitals to salt factories to hell, each with its own hazards and a boss at the end, usually a chase through an obstacle course. The look is bright, cartoonish pixel art, and Meat Boy leaves a bloody smear everywhere he slides, so a hard level ends up painted red with your attempts. It is funny in a slapstick way, and the soundtrack keeps the pressure up the whole time.