Sometime following the events of Super Meat Boy Forever, the evil Dr. Fetus gathered enough DNA samples to compose his own pocket Meat Boy. But like a foul reconstituted steak full of offal and additives, the initial results smell strongly of carrion. Hard, hard to properly clone a video game icon. To satisfy his ambitions, the doctoral embryo invents a series of test rooms stuffed with deadly traps supposed to exterminate non-viable organisms. That’s the whole narrative pretext behind Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine, which takes up the fundamentals of Puyo Puyo type match-4 games by transposing them into the violently sassy universe of Super Meat Boy. Team Meat promises to keep the DNA of platform games with challenges to tear off the toupee, spectacular bosses and a congruent artistic direction.
Is it the Dark Souls of match-4 or what?
More than 100 different levels await budding eugenicists. Combining puzzle and action, each room to cross will require you to assemble clones of the same color in packs of four… while dodging pockets of lava, jigsaws and other mechanisms of death. The progression, divided into different areas, will revisit well-known worlds from the series such as the hospital or the salt factory. To our delight, the artistic directors of the series will be faithful to the post, in particular the zicos of RIDICULON. Close to the mental universe of Edmund McMillen, this duo from Massachusetts has already set The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth to music, but also SMB Forever, of which they will remix several tracks for the Mean Meat Machine.
The original idea came from a prototype by the Headup studio developed in 2020. According to Tommy Refenes, historical co-creator of the franchise and mastermind of Team Meat, “work together [leur] captured the essence of Meat Boy and inject it into a whole new genre to create a never-before-seen puzzle game.“A more than ambitious task, the success of which we will be able to validate or deny in 2023 on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PS4, PS5 and Switch.
