80. Super Meat Boy (2010, Team Meat)
I have a lot of trouble with the simplest game mechanics. I can only solve a puzzle if you tell me it's a puzzle. The difficult buy-in you need to make in order to play games, which I think gamers might not realize, is that many games today assume you understand that certain things are puzzles and certain things aren’t. I have spent *so much* time on quests that aren’t quests. I have spent so much time not understanding that the way a certain object is drawn means I can interact with it. I have spent even more time knowing I can interact with something, but unable to manipulate the controls so it actually does something. Which often leads me to believe I was wrong, there’s no way to interact with that thing. It’s enough to kill my enthusiasm for the experience, and that’s basically how I felt about all games for most of my life: can be great fun if you buy in, but it’s really hard to find flow if you’re constantly distracted by your incompetence or lack of an object. A lot of the frustration I have with games doesn’t come from being killed, but from not understanding what I’m supposed to do.
So I love the experience of playing Super Meat Boy because the mechanics are incredibly simple but the game is incredibly hard. You are meat, a tiny adorable cube in a very sharp world, and you can walk, run and jump. If you do those things in the right way, you can stick to things a bit, like walls you can keep leaping onto and sliding down. Every time you die, you splotch the world red. Once you eventually beat the level, you see all your animated former selves run out and try everything you did, before the final one makes it to the end. It's incredibly satisfying, and the visual design of red splotches makes me itch to write a paper on embodiment; us meat people, moving our fingers to play as meat boys who leave bits of their physical bodies (because meat boy reincarnates so many times, he's gotta be plural) all over his world, literally coloring it with their effort and pain.
BUT Re: bandage girl—for god's sake, can we please come up with another mechanic besides princesses in towers? It's so goddamn boring at this point, and I don't care if it's a retro call back—lots of unacceptable things could be defended as retro callbacks, like racism or getting really upset when someone uses the wrong fork. It's like the entire industry came up with this one "girl in the refrigerator" mechanic and never made up another one.
