Beating the Backlog: Super Meat Boy

Time to beat: 12.5 hours.

Per hour, I have never cursed more, or fist pumped more, while playing a video game. While SMB starts off fairly easy, the difficulty quickly ramps up. The penultimate level and final boss probably took me an hour and a half apiece.

But the controls are both extremely simple and buttery-smooth, restarts after death are nearly instantaneous, and the frustration really only ramps up later on as levels become longer and deaths become more punishing.

This is because each death brings you all the way back to the start of the level, even if you were a minute in, and death can come early and often, always in a single hit.

But the game is almost always fair, when you die it's typically your own damn fault and not the game cheatin' you. And once you 'figure out' a tricky aspect of a level, it typically stays 'figured out' on successive runs, even if you must prove your newly won knowledge on each attempt. At times, it feels like tunneling through a mountain: you know the other side is out there somewhere, you know you're making progress, but you have to trust the process. Sometimes I beat a level on the first try, but other times, more often, SMB meant slowly but surely conquering a level chunk by chunk, until you finally pull off a satisfying clean run to the end of the level.

Like peanut butter on a stalk of celery, satisfying and teeth-grinding in equal measure.