There's a reason that, upon loading Super Meat Boy, you're met with a screen telling you to use a controller. It's difficult and things only get more difficult if you can't effectively twitch. But there's more than that, you've also got to learn a degree of muscle memory to get through the harder levels and that's where the challenge comes in. For an iOS game, that sort of gameplay isn't really possible to the same level and Super Meat Boy Mobile needed to make changes.
"[The original] Meat Boy was a twitch-based game about memorizing things," lead designer at Team Meat, Edmund McMillen, told Polygon. "[iOS] Meat Boy is the opposite. That's the foundation of its design. But it's also on a touch device, so there's that as well. We want to make a twitch-based platformer that's not about memorization."
Another stand-out feature of Super Meat Boy was the awesome, varying art style of the title, recalling countless graphical capabilities of the past. Of course, that meant the graphical style for Meat Boy Mobile needed to be stand-out as well.
"I'm happy about the art style," McMillen continued. "The more gentle and nice we make it look, the more vicious the story can be. Wouldn't it be so awesome to bait kids in with this happy little Meat Boy thing and then, the ending of the first chapter, instead of the squirrel getting his head knocked off, Meat Boy gets his face sawed in half? Like a skinned looking face looking at the screen?
"My goal is to scare the shit out of my three-year-old nephew."
