Meat and greed

A young lad who has to rescue either his kidnapped girlfriend or a princess from the clutches of an evil adversary ... there could hardly be a more classic beginning to a (video game) hero story. Many Nintendo games follow this pattern to this day - successfully! Based on this, a Flash game called Meat Boy, that, like many indie-games, was published on the Newgrounds website. In it, a box-shaped lump of meat hops through increasingly difficult levels to free his girlfriend Bandage Girl from the clutches of Dr. Fetus. Sounds silly, and it was, but it was just as entertaining.

Two years later, the developer duo Team Meat, consisting of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, released the official Super Meat Boy game. This played much more smoothly than the online version, but was also much more difficult as a result. I myself had a few entertaining hours with the slippery Meat Boy, but the frustrating trial-and-error concept didn't keep me hooked in the long run. With Celeste , I was able to put up with the Kaizo approach - the official name for deliberately difficult platformers/jump-'n'-runs - largely because of the game's story. What was cool, however, was that after completing a level we could see all the previous failed attempts, a kind of visualized learning curve.

The wall-jumping and chainsaw-dodging was already musically decorated in its web version by Danny Baranowsky. The American is probably best known for his work on The Bindig of Isaac and Crypt of the NecroDancer , but has an impressive list of compositions for smaller indie projects, none of which I know. For Super Meat Boy , Baranowsky composed a 34-track OST as well as a Digital Special Edition with 46 additional tracks.

Anyone familiar with his style will quickly recognize elements from other scores such as The Binding of Isaac . In general, the album leans towards fast electro beats and driving synths, which seems to make perfect sense given the idea of the game. To my ears, the music remains a little too uniform and lacking in highlights in terms of scope. If you compare what you hear with genre relatives such as Celeste or the fantastic composition for The Messenger, Baranowsky's work feels a little trivial.

Rock/metal influences such as in Hot Damned (Ch 4 Light World), Meat Golem (Ch 4 Boss) or End Credits add some variety to the electro party, but despite the charming retro magic (RETRO-tracks), the album is not a hit for me. The additional songs from the Digital Special Edition , along with a few remixes by other artists, hardly make any noteworthy contributions either. Nevertheless, these small complements show that there are advantages to having several artists working on one score: less coherence, but a little more variety. The anarchic Castle Crashers , which also originated on Newgrounds , has already shown that this works.

However, that's not to say that there aren't a few smaller gems like the very dramatic It Ends (Ch 5 Light World) . Its combination of drums, electric guitars and piano intermezzo evokes memories of the over-the-top pathos of Broforce and works better for me than the rest of the score due to its structure, as it goes less in the usual repetitive, loopable direction. Unfortunately, it remains the only 5-star track for me.

So is that it? Basically, yes, if we leave out the 5th Anniversary Soundtrack released in 2015. This celebrates, unsurprisingly, the fifth anniversary of the game with 43 additional tracks, this time not by Baranowsky but by several composers. These include the duo Ridiculon, consisting of Matthias Bossi & Jon Evans (The Binding of Isaac), David 'Scattle' Scattliffe (Furi / Hotline Miami: The Takedown) and Laura Shigihara (Plants vs. Zombies).

As with the actual OST, there's nothing really remarkable here, but the artists add their own flair to the Super Meat Boy style. Nice to have, but for me it's probably only a recommendation for fans of the game or genre.