Super Meat Boy: The Novel is one of the best books ever written. In the modern literature industry, where virtually anyone can finish a book, Super Meat Boy: The Novel is a throw back to an earlier, better time. Super Meat Boy: The Novel is available in only the bound hardcover format, a retro touch that all hardcore literature lovers who grew up reading books printed on the Gutenberg Entertainment System will appreciate. If you're used to modern books, with their page numbers and other in-book tutorials, or even worse, used to Kindles that perpetually save your progress and allow you to restart wherever you stop (even mid-sentence!), Super Meat Boy: The Novel might not be for you. But if you're a hardcore reader that misses the simple pleasures of the retro-reading experience--carrying large heavy books, using bookmarks, having bookmarks fall out your book and then needing to re-read several pages of the book until you can remember where you left off--then Super Meat Boy: The Novel will satisfy your hardcore retro reading desires.
Super Meat Boy: The Novel starts off slow, the first 12 pages or so primarily consist of simple three to five word sentences to familiarize you with the idea that you'll be reading a book, and the types of words that will appear in this book. This is nothing like an in-book tutorial. However, mixed in with those sentences are famous lines from other books and stories! These lines come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with anything but it's really neat to remember one book while you're reading another! You'll have to be a really dedicated hardcore reader to get all the references though.
Once you get past those first few pages the real action starts. Super Meat Boy: The Novel is hard, so expect to fail often. None of it feels cheap, though, because the font is so nice, and the words are all there in the book, so when you fail it's just because you didn't try hard enough to figure out that page's trick. On some pages the words are in a completely random order and you'll be forced to experment until you find just the right order to read them. One page was written almost entirely in homophones so you had to say it out loud for it to make any sense. Another page was written in Sumerian! And I know this is sort of a spoiler, but reading "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore FART thou, Romeo" in Sumerian is hilarious, and really hardcore retro readers will know that this is a sweet meta joke about the localization errors that often plagued Gutenberg Entertainment System releases.
So the hilarious references to other books continue throughout even the challenging hardcore sections of Super Meat Boy: The Novel, which is good becasue it means that the book never strays from its central theme: literature was somewhat different and less accessible twenty years ago, and only the truly hardcore and retro can remember that time and appreciate how the inaccessibility made literature more awesome. This litearture enthusiast and self-proclaimed Gutenberg fanboy gives Super Meat Boy: The Novel a perfect review score of 10. It's even better than Helen of Troy's tits!
*I actually thought Super Meat Boy was pretty fun, but good lord the reviews were frustrating.
