In precision platformer Clown Meat, you have to cheer up a Godzilla-sized clown from Jupiter

rockpapershotgun.com:

I've done some elementary study of the planet Jupiter for various creative research projects/dead-ends. It's probably a symptom of my failings as an astronomer, but I have to say that at no point have I noticed any gigantic, depressed clowns. In new platformer Clown Meat, one such gigantic, depressed clown has swum through Jupiter's atmosphere, drifted to Earth and kicked off some kind of meatpunk apocalypse, saturating the surrounding countryside with circus-themed abominations.

You play a much, much smaller clown, born within and then cruelly ripped from a hill of festering clownflesh by a pair of large talking clown hands. What are you born into this dreadful world to do? Cheer the big clown up, the talking clown hands explain. How are you to do this? Well, it starts with a series of murderous platforming challenges featuring gaseous proto-clowns who can ghost through surfaces, hissing clown lampreys and horrible, off-white clown tumours that kill you on contact. There are also many spike pits and deadfalls, which seem downright wholesome in the context.

Your goal in each level is to reach one of those motherly clown hands, with faster completion times resulting in happier clown faces on a score graph that resembles a funfair strength-testing machine. In between these vicious stabs of platforming, you'll speak to and perhaps, entertain a range of monstrous side characters. "Bring a smile to the withered and wretched faces of humanity," explains the Steam page. "Meet other bio-clowns, speak to creatures of whispering hands, converse with juggernauts of nasal tentacles, you never know who your audience might be."

There's a demo for Clown Meat on Itch and Steam. I had a play over the weekend, and while it sometimes just feels like Super Meat Boy with different art, I adore the absolute full-bore mankiness of the setting - the total commitment to a world made from and dedicated to the abject misery of clowns. The clown hand characters remind me a little of the