20 Best Indie Games Of The Decade
15. Super Meat Boy
Remember that run of pixel-based platformers that felt as though they made up the entire indie space in the mid-2010s?
That was all from the immaculate Super Meat Boy - a game that takes Super Mario 3's sensibilities and difficulty, and cranks those dials even more.
Known today as one of the hardest titles in all of gaming, the phrase "pixel perfect" doesn't even cut it. SMB is a lesson taught in a painstakingly obvious way: Either you learn the levels, jumps and gaps like the back of your hand, or you perish a few thousand times.
An instant-restart puts you back to try again, and you're always greeted by the brilliant idea of showing every failed attempt at once, at the close of a run.
Super Meat Boy is a delight, all told, but it's also a pure distillation of late 80s platformers, done in a way that makes you fall in love or flip a middle finger.