Now this is a weird one. Developed by Mega Cat Studios, The Meating is an actual NES game as developed in the year of our lord 2024, and you can buy a physical cart or get the game on the electronic shop of your choosing. It definitely feels like an NES game, the kind of game your grandmother bought you for Christmas because she was pretty sure you didn’t already have it. It has a certain charm, and by NES standards, it feels authentic. That said, I didn’t find it particularly engaging…and it just keeps going.
As the story begins, a minotaur is catfished and winds up in a butcher’s shop, where he’s killed and chopped apart. You play as his ghost, a floating bull’s head, drifting from room to room in an effort to get your body back, although that’s not an immediate concern. Instead, the ghostly minotaur, who I started referring to as “Carl” for some reason, navigates innumerable short puzzle rooms. I would liken The Meating to something like Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle or The Adventures of Lolo. In each stage, Carl must find a key to unlock the door to the next stage. This is usually pretty straightforward, as no individual puzzle room is especially complicated. In general, you’ll be avoiding (or ramming) enemies, hitting switches, and using Carl’s powers to find the key and its corresponding door.
Oh yes, Carl acquires a number of interesting powers during his journey. In the first level, he’ll be able to move green blocks telepathically and phase through single blocks. Other powers include the ability to set fires, cross into an alternate version of the stage to find hidden items, and possess enemies. Carl can also hover and fly in a straight line. All of these abilities eat up your magic meter, so you have to efficiently deploy Carl’s abilities to avoid running out, lest you be forced to restart the stage (magic-refueling pots are rare).
Carl can also die, despite being a ghost, and I was often kicked back to the main menu. The game uses passwords, but there’s no need to keep a notepad nearby unless you quit the game; going to the password screen automatically sets you up with the key to your last known location. I would have preferred unlimited lives and auto-saving, but since The Meating is going for that authentic NES feeling, I can understand Mega Cat Studio’s commitment to the bit.
No stage takes longer than five minutes to beat, which is welcome, but also becomes a slog. The game overstays its welcome, especially once you get to the end and are sent on a “second quest” with all your powers at your disposal, looking for paths you weren’t able to access before. Each level has its own boss, and figuring out what you’re supposed to do to injure them is part of the puzzle…just know that you must use your available powers to defeat them, and sometimes that’s less intuitive than it should be.
The Meating looks okay, but certainly doesn’t stand up to other NES games in terms of graphical details, especially since the only real change between levels is the set dressing. The music is fine but forgettable. Control is generally fine, although the “cooked chicken” enemies, which double as descending/ascending platforms, are extremely finicky, and I was never able to approach them safely. They will injure Carl if they land on him, and they drop like a ton of bricks, so you have to be careful on your approach. Cycling through your powers with Select (or Minus) is expected, but pressing Up + B to activate and deactivate them is weirdly unintuitive, though I’m not sure what a better scheme would be on an NES controller.
But the game’s coup de grâce, to me anyway, is that after a certain amount of it, I had to force myself to continue. Now, part of that is because Astro Bot came out, and The Meating cannot compete with Astro Bot. But the majority of my playtime occurred before Sony’s answer to Super Mario Galaxy launched, and I had become unenthused about further puzzle-solving by then. I also, and this seems petty, don’t like the game’s name because it doesn’t describe it in the least. The Meating sounds a lot like “the meeting,” which doesn’t tell you anything about The Meating. There’s also a surprising dearth of protein in the game because you are a ghost.
There may be an eager audience for an NES puzzle room game, but it’s apparently not me. Your mileage may vary, so watch a few videos before making the call.
