How Do You Make ‘Super Meat Boy’ Better? Throw a Body at It

In our rather fast-moving industry, it's important to remember the excellent kindergarten lesson about judging books by their covers. A case in point: Super Rude Bear Resurrection, a thoughtfully-designed platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy (but with a very clever, macabre corpse mechanic). The cover, such as it is, doesn't inspire much faith: starring a backwards cap-wearing teddy bear from East London and boasting a title that evokes the god-awful Naughty Bear, it could easily get lost in the fray.

I don't want that to happen, because Super Rude Bear Resurrection is really well-crafted and feels great to play. You control the, uh, rude bear as you adventure through buzzsaw-and-spike filled 2D stages, wall-jumping, popping off of tiny bits of geometry, and generally trying to stay alive until the next checkpoint. It's fast, it's slippery, and like Meat Boy, you die a TON, but respawn quickly, keeping the action fast and loose.

Importantly, Super Rude Bear is far more accessible. On the default difficulty, whenever you die, you leave a corpse right where you fell. Said teddy-body will stick to spikes (allowing you a safe, if bloody, platform to jump on), or offer a sort of meat shield, giving you a layer of protection against the many deadly threats in any given screen of action.

I love this.

Seriously, when a game apes a genre (or sub-genre) classic well, but offers a genuinely new take on something core to that experience—in this case, dying—the designer has done their job beautifully. It doesn't present Meat Boy's difficulty as a problem to be solved, rather as an almost-literal stepping off point for this other take.

Levels are structured intelligently, with plenty of checkpoints after (and before) particularly harrowing feats. I never felt frustrated playing the game, even when I had to dodge arrows coming at me on three levels AND hit a jump perfectly AND get the timing right to avoid a swinging axe. The maze-like structures always make sense (at least, from a pacing standpoint).

The game is thoughtful in other ways, with myriad settings that affect difficulty and speed (some of which are deliberately aimed at speedrunners, like an ability to manipulate the RNG elements.) I think it's safe to say I'll never use these, but hey, it's a very smart inclusion. Developer Alex Rose clearly wanted to make a game that works for different kinds of players, and they've succeeded.

There's something else that works in Super Rude Bear's favor, and that is its music. Ill-equipped as I am to discuss the merits of grime, the Deeco-produced soundtrack is energetic and propulsive and generally, just fun.

I'd love to see more small studios take this sort of approach. Take something you love, understand what makes it great, and make it better in some small way. Or just different.