Look out below! Team Meat's sadistic meat mascot is finally leaping into the third dimension with Super Meat Boy 3D, scheduled for early 2026 release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. It's a bold step forward for a series that originally started its life as a Flash-based sidescroller on Newgrounds, translating the blood-soaked precision platforming that defined the original 2010 cult classic into a fully three-dimensional space. Based on our hands-on time with the newest preview build, we can confidently say this isn't just the same old Super Meat Boy. Instead, it’s shaping up to be a thoughtful reimagining that captures the essence of what makes the series beloved while embracing new possibilities that only 3D can offer.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Super Meat Boy is a high-speed platformer that follows the adventures of a skinless protagonist attempting to rescue his girlfriend – Bandage Girl – from the villainous Dr. Fetus… a literal fetus in a jar with a perpetual grudge. Unlike the original game and its 2020 sequel, both of which are legendary for their punishing difficulty and death-defying speed, Super Meat Boy 3D feels less unfairly brutal and more chill while retaining some of the harder challenges for those who want to reclaim the series' hardcore platforming roots in 3D.
The preview build on Steam opens with an eye-catching menu, and the interface is both immediately functional and slick-looking. One quick tap of the A button on your controller and you’re thrust into the action within seconds – but, if you linger in the main menu a bit longer, you may find yourself wandering into the robust settings menu, which reveals decently comprehensive accessibility options and good flexibility in the graphics department as well. It’s cool to see options to toggle on a ground distance helper, for instance, which projects where you'll land when airborne. There's also a replay character slider that determines how many ghostly versions of Meat Boy appear in the post-level replays, watching your recorded run play back alongside multiple failed attempts in swarms of up to 100 little guys.
The controls translate Super Meat Boy's responsive movement into 3D with surprising grace. On an Xbox controller, jumping, sprinting, wall-running, and dashing all feel snappy and precise. Meat Boy does have a slightly floaty quality in midair that took a few untimely deaths to get the hang of, but a midair dash ability (default mapped to X) allows you to correct trajectory mistakes on the fly – a crucial addition given the added complexity of navigating 3D space. Wall-running and wall-jumping work similarly to the original's wall-slides, letting you bounce between vertical surfaces to reach higher platforms. Interestingly, the preview build lacks the punch ability mentioned in the control scheme and features no combat whatsoever, leaving us curious whether enemy encounters will play any role in the final release or if this remains a pure obstacle-course platformer.
The level design effectively utilizes verticality in ways its 2D predecessors couldn't, with multi-tiered structures that had us jumping upward off walls, dashing across gaps, and ground-slamming down vertical shafts to avoid descending spike balls. The ground slam (mapped to B) proved more useful than we initially expected, letting us rapidly descend to dodge hazards that dropped from above. Environmental obstacles include classic platformer staples, like buzz saws, bear traps, crumbling platforms, and industrial crushers – alongside new physics-based challenges like the aforementioned spike balls, which drop into peculiarly-located chutes that require you first to bypass other obstacles and then properly time your descent to survive.
True to series tradition, death comes frequently and gruesomely. As one might expect, Super Meat Boy 3D’s cube of exposed muscle tissue is prone to meeting countless splattery ends, immediately respawning him at the level start with the timer reset. The blood trail Meat Boy leaves on every surface he touches paints increasingly macabre patterns across the pastel environments with each attempt, and it's darkly comical watching pristine grassy fields transform into crime scenes. The sound design enhances this with squelchy, splattery audio that recalls Splatoon's ink-based aesthetic, while environmental sounds like the whir of saw blades and the mechanical grinding of crushers create an appropriately cartoony yet threatening audio landscape.
Performance is measured purely by completion time and death count, with letter grades awarded based on how quickly you reach each level's exit. An A+ rank requires finishing under a target time with zero deaths, which is a tall order that demands memorization and flawless execution. There's no score system, no collectible currency, just you versus the clock and your own mortality. We did discover hidden collectible band-aids tucked into secret areas behind destructible wooden walls, though their purpose remains unclear in the preview build. Whether they unlock content, costumes, or bonus levels in the full game is anyone's guess.
Speaking of post-game content, the post-level replay system deserves special mention as one of the preview's most entertaining features. After completing a stage, you watch your successful run play back while multiple ghost versions of Meat Boy attempt the same route, most meeting horrible deaths before one mirror-image completes the course following your exact path. It's simultaneously satisfying and hilarious, transforming your hard-earned victories into miniature spectacles of failure. The max replay characters setting lets you crank this up, filling the screen with doomed meat cubes.
What's less clear is the scope of the full release. The preview build contained no boss fights (though a cutscene showed what appeared to be a giant robot), no multiplayer options, and a theater mode that remained inaccessible. The narrative setup – Dr. Fetus once again kidnapping someone dear to Meat Boy, this time appearing to be Bandage Girl based on her pink coloring – suggests we're returning to familiar story beats, though the series has never prioritized plot, and from what I’ve seen so far, that trend isn’t set to change with its first 3D outing. The linear level structure and lack of significant exploration or secret-hunting may disappoint players expecting more Metroidvania-style progression, though this has always been Super Meat Boy's MO: pure, distilled platforming challenge without excessive baggage.
Super Meat Boy 3D’s decently challenging and often enjoyable gameplay loop settles into a zen-like flow state once you accept the trial-and-error nature of mastery in its colorful world. This is very much a "podcast game" – something you can successfully zone out to while listening to something else, and by the fifth run through the preview build, we couldn’t help but think about how strong a fit it’ll be for Steam Deck owners who like to sneak in play sessions before bed. That's not necessarily criticism; there's value in games that don't demand your complete emotional investment, and this is undeniably one of those games. It’s just a shame that there’s no Switch 2 version currently announced. Half-joking!
The difficulty, while present, didn’t reach the soul-crushing heights the series is notorious for, at least in these early stages, but that’s not such a bad thing to bring in a broader playerbase – as long as the final version still provides ample challenge to series fans. Whether that manifests in later worlds or if Team Meat has softened the challenge for broader appeal remains to be seen, but I’m hoping it's the former.
Graphically, Super Meat Boy 3D strikes a pleasing balance between the series' cartoonish aesthetic and modern rendering techniques for an increasingly atmospheric experience as the levels progress. The preview build already teases robust graphics options, including a nice list of anti-aliasing methods, post-processing effects, shadow quality, global illumination, reflections, and foliage density. While DLSS remained grayed out in my build, the game ran silky smooth at near-144fps on an RTX 4070Ti, with excellent optimization even at maximum settings on an ultrawide 3440x1440 display. The environments pop with visual personality: grassy starting areas give way to burning forests with spinning saw blades embedded in charred trees, which then transition into grimy industrial zones filled with crushers, spike-dropping machines, and pools of toxic waste. Everything maintains that high-contrast, storybook-meets-nightmare quality that defined the original, but with added geometric complexity and environmental detail that wouldn't be possible in 2D.
Comparisons to other modern 3D platformers are inevitable, but may be a bit unfair to the scope that Super Meat Boy 3D is tackling. What we’ve played so far lacks Astro Bot's inventively kinetic mechanics and character-driven charm, Mario Odyssey's exploratory freedom, or even Crash Bandicoot 4's level design variety. Instead, Super Meat Boy 3D feels more akin to Ghost Runner's fast-paced, die-and-retry philosophy mixed with the geometric verticality and graphical style of Pac-Man World II – and then just heavily distilled from there, down to something much smaller and tighter, like a little cube of tightly-packaged meat in a convenience store freezer. There are no rings or coins to collect here: just brutal platforming, and this reinvention does it smoothly enough to feel satisfying even after several back-to-back runs of the same preview content.
Your skills will improve with each run, hitting more A+ ranks as your muscle memory develops. At least that addictive "just one more try" quality that defined the original is totally present here. The question is whether Team Meat can sustain that momentum across a full game, and whether enough content, variety, and surprises await in the final release to justify the journey into 3D.
Super Meat Boy 3D shows promise as a faithful translation of the series' darker cartoon comedy appeal into three dimensions, with responsive controls, strong performance, and level design that embraces verticality while maintaining the tight challenge loops that made the original special. But, at least at this point in its development cycle, significant questions remain about the scope of its content upon release, how well its combat will feel in action, what those hidden collectibles unlock, and if this tight-knit formula can stay fresh throughout a complete game.
