The two-man team behind ruthless indie jumper Super Meat Boy has begun its next title, and it sounds like a far cry from the conventional platforming of its break-out hit.
Team Meat co-founders Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes confirmed to Eurogamer that work is underway on an "ambitious", "fun", "more experimental" project, though were coy on more precise details.
"I think it's safe to say that Meat Boy was a very straightforward game. We didn't really reach outside the box in terms of design," explained McMillen. "I think with the new game we definitely get a bit more experimental with the design.
"I think it's going to be more ambitious design-wise and it's going to be more of a challenge for us. It's a bigger project. It's going to be fun and that's exactly why we're into it. It's going to be pretty fresh."
Earlier this year the pair confirmed they were approved 3DS developers, though it seems like the platform is not currently foremost in its plans.
Though a 3DS port of Super Meat Boy was considered, that's been ditched in favour of the new game. Indeed, they currently don't even have a dev kit for the system.
"We said we're approved as 3DS developers," said McMillen. "We don't have dev kits though not many people do. At least that's what we heard. Who knows, maybe they're lying to us.
"We've asked about when we could get one and they said there's stock coming, but we probably shouldn't even talk about this.
"We were originally kind of into porting Meat Boy to it, but the game we're working on now is very exciting and it probably won't work on the 3DS. I don't know if it will or not, or if it would be a good idea for it.
"We're going to approach the next game in the same way we did Meat Boy. We're just going to make a game and if it works on whatever system it works on then good, but we're not designing this game with a specific system in mind."
Team Meat isn't quite done with Super Meat Boy though. The pair confirmed a Mac version is still in the works.
"Later, later," replied Refenes when asked when it might be ready for release. "I'm doing my absolute best. It's something that's bugging the s*** out of me, that I want to get finished.
"It's a lot of mental effort getting back into working on a game that I worked on for 18 months straight. The difficulty is not in the work, the difficulty is in the motivation and the desire to open up the code again and work on it when I'd rather work on new stuff. I'm doing it, it's just taking a while."
Team Meat's sublime debut picked up a near perfect 9/10 when it launched on PC and Xbox Live Arcade last year. Take a look at our Super Meat Boy review for more.
This is Freeman as he appears on the box art for 2006's Half-Life 2 in 2004. There hasn't been a new Half-Life game since 2007, despite fans' frequent pleas to series' creator Valve Software to make a new one.
