Super Meat Boy
Basted youth.
There are sawblades - some that move vertically or laterally across walls and floors, some on pendulums or rotating around fixed points, some fired at you at regular intervals - but also bouncing lava balls, and instant-death lasers that slowly trail you, forcing you to hide or jump cleverly to manipulate them and sneak past. There are rockets, keys that remove key blocks, dissolving platforms, and even portals that preserve momentum and trajectory. But they all speak the same language, their implications immediately apparent.
Everything is super-fast, but the best levels are a clever mixture of dexterity and ingenuity, so you always feel smart and skilful when you succeed - and the best ones are the overwhelming majority, even though one level is often so different to the next in tempo and construction that to an untrained observer they might as well be from different games.
Disciples of Super Meat Boy would recognise them, however, and that's because this is a game whose 16-bit aesthetic, jokey unlockables and comedy cut-scenes, which dramatise Meat Boy's quest to save Bandage Girl from the evil Dr Fetus, are a cute deception. On the surface this looks like any other freewheeling, fun-loving indie platform game, but behind the scenes it's exquisitely engineered.
Everywhere you look there are calculations masquerading as quirks. Whenever Meat Boy touches a surface or meets his maker, for example, he leaves splashes of blood, and when you respawn at the start these remain in place, meaning that by the time you've had a couple of dozen attempts, which is nothing unusual, you've painted the town red. Haha! There's blood everywhere! But it's also a record of exactly where you put a foot wrong, and it influences your behaviour.
Super Meat Boy's party trick is the same. Whenever you finish a level, you're shown a replay - but not just of the successful attempt. Instead you're shown recordings of all your previous attempts overlaid on one another at once, so meat and blood splash and burn everywhere until only one boy remains. It's funny - death in Super Meat Boy can be hilarious, so imagine dozens at once - but it also spurs you on, because you can see how practice made perfect. If you've ever trained for something, imagine all that hard work made suddenly tangible, there at your side as you bask in the afterglow of success.
This is a lovely game, and a clever game, and it's also quite a big game. There are hundreds of levels, and more secrets than I will probably ever discover, and there are leaderboards and all sorts of other things to uncover and enjoy. There's even a cast of unlockable characters from other indie games, each with their own special ability. Tim from Braid, for example, can rewind a little bit of time.
Super Meat Boy is an indie game that loves being an indie game, for sure, but its retro stylings are more than just window dressing. All the warp zones, the chip-tunes and Insert Coin prompts are tributes, but they can also be worn as badges of membership. What little there is that doesn't work or falls flat, like the odd annoying boss fight, is quickly forgotten, because for the majority of the time this is a game where you can feel the spirit level resting on the supporting beams, just as you could with the old masters like Super Mario World.
To rein in the hyperbole for a second, it is not quite that inventive or inspirational, but beneath the veil of difficulty it is every bit as inviting and thrillingly engineered. Super Meat Boy starts out as just another indie game that revels in driving you crazy, but you end up crazy in love.