I didn't find out about this until today, since I don't keep up with gaming news, but apparently it's been in the works for a few years now. It's set to release on EGS on December 23rd.

The original Super Meat Boy, which released in 2010, scratched an itch I didn't know I had. It helped to cultivate in me a love for precision platformers, and for any difficult game with tight, precise controls. It also instilled in me a respect and admiration for indie games and the people who pours years worth of blood, sweat, and tears into them. Team Meat, which consisted of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, were among the developers covered in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie, which focused on a few different indie game developers, what they were striving to do, and the struggles they faced. SMB was among a number of works that really helped to pave the way for the ambitious, incredibly high-quality indie games we see today, which now includes titles like Hades. Indie gaming has come a long way.

As for SMB itself, as a game, it still holds up. It's tight, exciting, and fun. They made key changes to the traditional platformer gameplay model which have since become commonplace. Longer stages were replaced with short, self-contained levels, many of which could fit on a single screen, and limited lives were traded out for infinite, instant retries. By putting as few obstacles as possible between the player and another attempt, they manage to make a high degree of difficulty fun. When you die, you don't have to watch some irritating death cinematic or lose a bunch of progress; you simply try again, right then and there. The more I died, the more I wanted to keep playing. It worked beautifully.

After SMB, Ed McMillen went on to make The End Is Nigh, which a lot of SMB fans didn't like, since it was a much slower, more precision based game. Without the breakneck pacing, some players didn't find it as fun or engaging. I personally loved it, and pushed myself farther in TEIN than I ever did in SMB.

The new game has a new team. Tommy Refenes is still there, with some other developers, but Edmund McMillen isn't involved anymore. They've brought on Ridiculon to compose the soundtrack, instead of Danny Baranowsky who worked on the music in the original SMB. Ridiculon also did music for TEIN, Binding of Isaac, and some other games. Their music in TEIN was all classical remixes. It'll be interesting to see what original music they bring to SMBF.

As for the gameplay of SMBF, it seems quite different from before. The levels are dynamically put together from smaller handcrafted segments, thus leading to a different run every time. I guess getting some inspiration from the procedural generation of modern roguelikes and opting for that variety rather than a set of a static levels. I don't mind that at all. You can now punch things. However, the game is now an auto-runner. Rather than directly controlling movement, you've only got a jump, a jump attack, a dive, and a slide, and the game is balanced around that.

I've got some reservations about the gameplay changes, especially the loss of free movement. But even so, I'm excited for the game. This and Hollow Knight: Silksong are probably the indie titles I'm currently most looking forward to, but SMBF is dropping a lot sooner. Silksong is probably still a ways off.