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Dr. Fetus's Mean Meat Machine is a match-4 spinoff in the Super Meat Boy universe

Based heavily on Puyo Puyo and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, Team Meat's next game is a match-4 puzzle game coming in 2023.

TJ Denzer

March 20, 2023 10:45 AM

Image via Team Meat

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Team Meat’s next game is taking the goopy and gross shenanigans of the Super Meat Boy universe in a far more puzzle-minded direction. Today, the studio revealed Dr. Fetus’s Mean Meat Machine. It’s a match-4 puzzle game in which players will seek to fit and connect various colored blobs together, and it’s coming to PC and consoles sometime in 2023.

Team Meat announced Dr. Fetus’s Mean Meat Machine as its next game via a new trailer on March 18, 2023. Set in the Super Meat Boy universe, it still has characters like the titular Dr. Fetus, Meat Boy, Bandage Girl, and all the grimy and gross goodness of a Team Meat game. This time around, however, it’s all set to a new puzzle theme as player use Dr. Fetus’s twisted contraptions to match pairs of colored shapes and creatures to a board of them, attempting to combine at least four of the same color together and create combos for high scores.

Dr. Fetus’s Mean Meat Machine is a pretty obvious homage to some of Sega’s classic games, including the Puyo Puyo series, which is still running today, and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, from which Team Meat’s game is pretty clearly a direct riff. You drop your blobs two at a time, reorienting them as they fall. If they land on two different elevations, then one will break off and keep falling, allowing players to make interesting matches and combo plays with their resources.

That said, there are some neat Super Meat Boy twists on Dr. Fetus’s Mean Meat Machine. For one, there are obstacles that will destroy your blobs on the way down. It looks a lot like trying to get through a Super Meat Boy level and could get really difficult at later stages as you both try to match colors and dodge saw blades and the like.

Dr. Fetus’s Mean Meat Machine is slated to launch sometime in 2023, with PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch platforms confirmed. As we await more details and a concrete launch date, stay tuned here at Shacknews for updates and check out more Team Meat coverage.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.