Super Meat Boy 3D uses Unreal Engine 5 and a Mario twist to evolve the classic

The transition of beloved 2D games to 3D can be hit-and-miss. Famously, Mario revolutionised 3D platforming with Super Mario 64, while Sonic's high-speed floundered when having to work with another dimension. So when it comes to indie sensation Super Meat Boy, famed for being a tough-as-nails side-scrolling twitch platformer, you might think that it couldn't work without losing the essence of what makes it a Meat Boy game.

Nonetheless, Super Meat Boy 3D was one of the surprise announcements from this year's Xbox Summer Showcase. Unlike Moonlighter 2, whose developer had evolved from 2D to 3D, this new game is being handled by Sluggerfly, an indie team that's already been making 3D platformers with Unreal Engine for over a decade, with Super Meat Boy 3D being its fourth. Given the studio's last game, Hell Pie featured macabre visuals and purposely edgy bad taste, it feels like a good fit, but in practice, it also presented completely new challenges.

"Our publisher had been talking to [Meat Boy co-creator] Tommy Refenes for a while, and they approached us with creating a 3D prototype, just to find out if it even works," Sluggeryfly co-founder and art director Dominik Plassmann tells me. "We had six months to create a prototype, so we could test all these different approaches and see if it even works."

The Super Mario 3D World influence

One prototype had actually been more of a 3D open world that would have had more of a collectathon structure, but would also have areas that lock the camera to a 2D perspective. Ultimately, however, the team landed on a fixed 3D camera system that takes inspiration from Super Mario 3D World.

"It helped us in terms of level design and for the overall precision of the game because most parts in the levels are built in defined angles, either 45-degree angles or 90-degree angles," co-founder and level design lead Christian Patorra explains.

Adding: "It's easier for the player to read the level, and we also added an 8-directional movement that's enabled at first, but the player is allowed to disable it. It helps to keep the player on track on those specific angles because you are on rails moving on them."

Super Meat Boy 3D is being developed with Unreal Engine 5, though don't expect the game to dazzle with the engine's tools like Nanite, although the procedural generation (PCG) tool has helped spread meshes for backgrounds. Ultimately, the aim has been to retain as much of the spirit of the original Meat Boy games as possible, not just the hardcore twitch-platforming, including Meat Boy's ability to wall-jump but also be readable with clear and simple visuals, or his signature blood trails that also help players remember the paths they previously took and what to avoid.

"The first game had a super iconic stylized look, but we also want to modernise it a bit, so we do have a lot of visual detail in some areas of the game," Plassman explains. "[With a fixed angle] it helps when you only have to design the level from that one perspective, but it also poses challenges, because you can easily create visibility problems, because you have to keep the foreground clean. You have to be careful with the angles so that the character is visible all the time."

Embracing a new dimension

3D nonetheless presents new opportunities to adapt Meat Boy staples. For instance, the saw blades are one of the iconic traps of the original game, but Plassman notes that you could simply side-step those in 3D. "We have meat grinders, basically the shape of a saw blade but a long cylinder that you can stretch over a long part of the level."

Gameplay-wise, the extra dimension also gives Meat Boy new abilities like being able to wall-run, as well as a ground-slam, a handy way for stopping yourself at a precise point in the air. But Patorra adds they also wanted to take inspiration from older games too, even the more divisive Super Meat Boy Forever. "Forever introduced new moves like dash, and that's super handy for us in 3D because it's this horizontal move that you can use to precisely dash through the 3D space to certain areas, so we copied that."

One other intriguing detail from the announcement trailer also showed multiple Meat Boys running around on a level, which made me think of the Cherry power-up in Super Mario 3D World. Plassman clarifies that it's not in fact a power-up but a cool new replay feature implemented for Super Meat Boy 3D.

He says, "When you complete the level, you see all of your tries at the same time, so you have 20-30 Meat Boys running around, and this was all your playthroughs of the level in replay at the same time," he concludes. "We wanted to keep this feature in there. It's one of the essential features that the game had to have."

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Super Meat Boy 3D will be coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC in 2026.