When I was younger, I loved playing this Pokémon Spin-Off called “Pokémon Puzzle League” for the N64. It was essentially “Puyo Puyo”, a puzzle game where you match blocks that fall from the top of the screen (much akin to Tetris) in columns or rows of at least three in order to clear your screen while also hindering the enemy’s screen.
Honestly, I love the idea of competitive puzzlers and Puyo Puyo was just that, really. Easy to get into but there’s a surprising amount of Depth and Strategy as well as Skill involved…
So, with that in mind, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was quite excited about Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine‘s release! It’s Puyo Puyo again but featuring Super Meatboy’s main villain!
Developer: Headup Development Publisher: Headup Publishing Genre: 2D, Arcade, Tile-Matching Puzzle, Action Release Date: June 22nd, 2023 Reviewed on: PC Available on: PC, Switch, PS4/5, XB1/S Copy provided by the publisher.
Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is a game where we step into the role of Dr. Fetus from Super Meatboy. Essentially, we’re trying to use different genes to evolve slime blobs into Meatboy clones, presumably to defeat Meatboy. It’s not that deep, really… You just have to match these gene blobs a bunch and as time goes on, you evolve them while clearing out levels.
These levels stretch across six worlds with about twenty levels each, involving a plethora of test chambers to put the defect genes blobs through the wringer in order to create the perfect Meatboy Clone… but while Dr. Fetus is trying to capture Meatboy’s essence, the developers of this game didn’t manage to do so.
In this game, you are supposed to combine these blobs that come in pairs from the ceiling by placing them down and then just connecting them. It’s not needed to have them in rows or columns as long as four or more blobs are connected.
Combining blobs fills up a bar that progresses you to the next stage once full. When you hit a trap with your falling blobs, you restart. When your blobs hit the top section of the screen, you also lose. Traps can also destroy already placed blobs. Combining a bunch of blobs in succession creates chains that grant invulnerability, though. Great!
The issue is that even though the game tells you to form chains and get combos… the game doesn’t want you to do that.
Any setup that you create for possible chains and all that fun stuff can and will get destroyed by sawblades spawning on top or moving to your existing blobs. It’s frankly incredibly punishing to even attempt to set up anything remotely strategic.
Furthermore, the game is frustrating. It’s not super challenging… rather, it’s just annoying.
The developers advertise this as a difficult experience but it’s not much of a challenge, theoretically, as long as you have nerves of steel and don’t mind dying to the same bullshit over and over and over and over again, completely resetting any of the aforementioned setups that you created.
To contrast that, Super Meat Boy and Super Meat Boy Forever had you platform your way through these chambers full of deadly hazards.
When you died in SMB or SMBF, it was a skill issue. It wasn’t because the game just placed a trap on top of you or because the game suddenly made you move into a trap by force. No, it was because you were too eager or too slow or you didn’t make a jump but it always felt fair, in my opinion, and actually challenging.
Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine doesn’t capture that in the slightest. You die because the game is poorly designed. The game doesn’t care about setups and chains even though it tells you to go for chains. The game doesn’t incentivise you to do any of that because the best way to get through a level is to just mash together four blobs as much as possible.
That gets boring. Fast.
There are no satisfying visual or sound effects that play out when you get a 2- or 3-chain, or a combo of six. Heck, combining two different colours at the same time doesn’t even count as a chain and doesn’t reward you in any way. Where is the serotonin boost?
Frankly, there is no skill expression. There is only frustration.
This isn’t a player issue but rather a game design issue. The levels are rather annoying and there’s no reason for you to do anything that requires set-ups, skills or strategy. Even if you do, the level could have been over by then and it most likely cost you a few nerves.
And it’s a shame. I truly mean it. If you play with invincibility on (a cheat available in the accessibility settings), the game becomes sort of playable but it doesn’t change the many core issues that the game has in terms of game design and level design.
The latter is rather poorly done, in my opinion, with levels getting stale, especially as frustration builds up. When you progress to the next stage in a level, it just adds more saw blades, typically, which gets boring quickly.
The hospital world introduces ghosts – that I found rather cool to play around with – as well as these ghost blocks that work like hindering Puyo from Puyo Puyo. Great! But to get to the hospital world and its interesting mechanics, you need to beat 14 Forest World levels and a boss fight that are just boring and tedious.
Frankly, I didn’t even bother past World 2 because of the fact that it just isn’t fun.
Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is a failed attempt at not just paying homage to a puzzle classic from more than 30 years ago but also at creating a spin-off to a much-beloved franchise.
It’s a shame. Truly.
Especially as the game also features art and animation by the original Meatboy artists… as well as music by RIDICULON with unique remixes from SMBF tracks as well as new scores… and those slap. Honestly, this game’s soundtrack is great. Shame that the game really doesn’t do it justice…
And on that note, I do have a lot of suggestions for improvements but it’d be too much for this review… If you want to hear it, devs, contact me via e-mail and I’ll give you an extensive list. If the game gets updated a bunch, I may revisit it for another look in the future.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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