Super Meat Boy 3D is the name, and it’s also exactly what this game is, for better or blander.
I’m not quite sure who Super Meat Boy 3D is for. One of the things that makes the 2D Meat Boy games so good is that they’re always built on precision and pixel muscle memory. Once we get going, we fall into a rhythm, almost being able to play the game blindfolded if we wanted to.
That’s not here though.
This game does a decent job of translating the IDEA of Meat Boy into a 3D space, and maybe that’s the point, but it doesn’t go beyond that. And, most importantly, it doesn’t quite understand what that means in the 3D space. In fact I feel like the execution of Meat Boy’s “move fast and die and then move fast again” runs is more about luck here than the rhymatic skill of its predecessors.
The jumps aren’t necessarily difficult, but they’re not easy to judge in 3D. There’s good speed and good weight to the character (and the many secret characters we can unlock) but that doesn’t quite work as well in a test of depth perception. The best way to describe it is like going from flicking a marble across a table over a gap versus flicking a marble up a ramp and over a gap. There’s some unpredictability involved.
The controls work well enough, and I actually like the dash move that zips us across a gap or through the air, but it’s just that inability to see things accurately that put these controls in despair. I’m playing on the Switch 2 and at first I couldn’t tell if some of the pop-in is just a by-product of this platform, but after just a quick curosy look at the version on Steam it seems to be everywhere, by design. Either way, it’s a bit distracting, especially when Meat Boy is behind a wall and we can’t figure out the 3D space around him to know where to go next.
The levels are short enough that they’re not going to wear us out, but I did quit a couple of times while playing just to dust away the slight frustration and come back later. That’s because they don’t quite adhere to the ultra-quick respawns of the series’ past, instead pushing us back quite a ways. It’s not fun to clear a really tricky section after several tries only to die on a boneheaded move and then be zapped all the way back before the challenging parts. Those initial levels are a little basic, meant to get us tooled to play the game, but they’re not that exciting. Instead, the later worlds and stages are where things pick up and are worthy of a nod to some neat details, especially the ones designed to simulate running in a sort of 2D space.
This is really just Meat Boy in 3D, and while it functionally works there are enough little annoyances that prevent it from earning that Super tag.
This review is based on a Switch 2 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. The video first appeared on The SideQuest for April 2, 2026.
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