Super Meat Boy 3D frustrates me just as much as the original – in a good way

Super Meat Boy, the 2010 platformer from Team Meat, is all about punishing mistakes. Not for the sake of punishment, really, but as a learning tool to train muscle memory and visual reflexes to eventually succeed. Similarly, having now played nearly an entire world on the Nintendo Switch 2 while at GDC 2026, Super Meat Boy 3D takes the same punishment to an entirely new dimension.

Traditionally, games that have you fail over and over and over again aren't really my thing. The best Metroidvanias and latest Soulslikes all look slick as hell yet absolutely miserable to me – even if I can recognize that they're designed well and understand how they earn their accolades. But Super Meat Boy sunk its teeth into me years ago and never really let go, despite my natural aversion.

So to say I've been apprehensive about Super Meat Boy 3D is a bit of an understatement. You can't really go home again, right? But it turns out you can build a similar home with new, expansive rooms. Of death. And gore.

Splat

If one were to consider Super Meat Boy as, say, the franchise's Super Mario World then Super Meat Boy 3D is akin to the franchise's Super Mario Odyssey. The perspective shift from 2D to something like an isometric 3D platformer isn't exactly seamless – more than once I found myself lost among the layered walls of a level's exceedingly deadly gauntlet – but it also works more often than it doesn't.

There's an almost myoclonic response to dying in Super Meat Boy, at least for me. You die, but you can tell you were just close enough and why it was your fault for dying instead of something like unfair level design. If you'd only just pivoted at the last moment, or if you'd sped through that one section instead of hesitating and waiting, then you absolutely could have made it. You just know it. And before that thought is even finished forming, you've respawned and the impulse is to test your luck one more time.

The kindest thing I can say about Super Meat Boy 3D is that it triggers this exact same sort of response. Even with the small amount of friction based on the transition to a new dimension, the same thoughts race through my head as I navigate a tricky series of platforms with holes, jump between walls, and generally try to avoid as many sharp blades as I possibly can. Even at its most frustrating, dying feels entirely my fault.

But that brief moment between those thoughts of blaming myself lasts a bit too long in Super Meat Boy 3D. I've no idea if it's the Switch 2 hardware, the game's inherent design, or simply the voice of nostalgia talking, but the cut to black in order to respawn is just slightly too long. It's the sort of thing like eyeballing an image, having a sinking suspicion that it's off but you're unsure how, and it turns out that it's a few pixels misaligned. It just feels wrong.

Then again, I'm also just older. My physical body isn't the same as it was, and maybe that's holding me back. Maybe it's roughly the same amount of time but feels longer to me. Unlike Meat Boy in Super Meat Boy 3D, I can't just respawn with the press of a button to try it all over again, but that's also probably a good thing considering I keep hitting that button by accident when I mean to jump.

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