SUUUUUUUUUUUUUPER MEAT BOY!

That is the phrase that will greet you upon loading up the recently released Xbox exclusive (It'll be on steam soon though!)

Let me get this out of the way. This game is hard. Very hard. It's very likely that you'll be dying more than a few thousand times before getting to the main end of the game. (By the way the main end is only about 30% of the games content) This platformer truly does hate you. And you will hate it, and love it. Offsetting it's insane difficulty are tight controls and very well designed stages. Every death in the game feels legit and every death is a learning experience. Every retry you'll gain a bit more understanding on how the level works and when you do finally nail it the resulting satisfaction is life nothing you've felt before. Then you're quickly pushed into the next, even harder level, and the process repeats.

The beautifully designed levels a accompanied by some wonderful art and music as well. Before each world are some pretty hilarious cut scenes that hold throwbacks to classic intro cutscenes from games like the original Castlevania and Megaman II.

Cutscenes aren't the only thing plucked from other games though. In many of the games warp zones are unlockable characters from other popular (and some obscure) indie games. A few examples being Commander Video from the BitTrip series and Tim from Braid. All of these unlockables along with the already lengthy main game makes for a game thats well worth the $15 price point.