Thanks to Mega Cat Studios for the review code
Title: The Meating
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 08/29/2024
Story
In this puzzle platformer, you take control of the spirit of Kon the Minotaur, who ended up getting butchered on a blind date and must go on a quest through multiple worlds to solve the mystery of his own demise! You get cutscenes between each of the worlds, advancing the story, but I wouldn’t call any of the plot developments you encounter all that surprising.
Presentation
For this NES game, we have 8-Bit Legit back with their usual porting wrapper, including the same options as… Huh? Wait, this game lacks the usual options?
Well, that makes things a bit trickier here. So yeah, you just boot into the game with not a single menu, border, or manual scan to be found. Despite the Switch eShop showing images with the usual 8BL border options, you can’t enable any of those in the game. I tried the usual L+R methods and other combos to bring up the menu, and nothing worked. It’s been a few weeks since launch and nothing has been patched in, so I’m just gonna assume it was either on purpose or an error nobody noticed. Either way, you just get the game here with no bonuses whatsoever. Just the game itself!
So, how does The Meating look and sound for a NES game? Pretty ordinary, really. The visuals are decent, each world being well detailed with shading to stand out from each other, and the music is fine enough, but none of the tracks stood out in my head after my time with the game, which is a small bummer considering how catchy some of the tunes in Roniu’s Tale was. I did at least like the eerie tune to the freezer stages, but not enough to a point I could fully remember it. At the very least, it fit the mood.
Gameplay
Kon must go through several worlds, gaining new ghostly powers along the way, and use those to find a key in each stage and get to the exit! Pretty simple stuff at first, with Kon having a basic jump, attack, and hover, before gaining new abilities like Thermokinesis to deal with the increasing stage hazards.
Kon might not be able to do harm to enemies with his usual attack, but the extra abilities eventually give him the means to take on several Boss Battles in the game, and these are honestly clever fights that I found pretty fun to figure out, since they require careful usage of your abilities and are more thought provoking than most of the shorter stages. You can also pause the game and scroll around to survey the other screens on a stage, which I also found to be helpful for the stages to plan out the right path to take.
Thankfully even if you do game over, continuing from the password menu is easy, as is the action of writing down passwords for continuing once you quit out of the game since once again, this 8-Bit Legit port lacks any sort of saving feature. That didn’t bug me as much as the missing menu options though, since the passwords are incredibly short and I was able to jump back into a game rather quickly by using the Switch capture feature to jot them down after losing all my lives.
Really you just have a decent little NES puzzler in a wrapper that provides nothing but the game itself, but while the boss battles were pretty fun, I ended up not really clicking with most of the other stages, especially as they were rather short and dull. You do eventually backtrack to some older stages to find the path to the true ending, but otherwise there’s no real reason to go to previous levels from the stage select menu.
Conclusion
Ultimately, The Meating was a perfectly average puzzle platformer, with no fatal flaws that hurt the game itself, but also nothing that makes it really stand out all that much. The abilities can be tricky to use at first, but each new one I uncovered was fun enough to try, and once I got the hang of it I was able to make progress and enjoy my time with the boss battles.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t find many of the levels in Meating to be all that engaging. It just feels like the game needed a bit more polish and more inspiring stages to keep things exciting, since as it stands now the game is just fine, but being placed in such a simplistic wrapper (which doesn’t even offer the usual features this time around) really makes this experience on Switch as bare-bones as it possibly could be, and compared to Mega Cat’s other, stronger puzzlers, this one is just a middle of the road one for me.
The bosses were clever, but the other stages didn’t really engage all that much, and I feel if you want a Mega Cat puzzler on Switch, Roniu’s Tale is still the must-have game to nab. That one just has a lot more brain-pushing puzzles from the get go, while The Meating takes a bit too long to get going, and doesn’t exactly excite once it does. Still, I do feel this one would be a bit more warranted as a physical NES pickup, since playing this on a retro NES pad would just be more right than a barebones Switch port.
I give The Meating a 5 out of 10.