  |
This article's content is marked as Mature The page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
The Meat, also known as the Iron Meat is the main antagonist of the 2024 run 'n' gun indie videogame Iron Meat.
It is a malevolent, interdimensional entity that seeks to invade Earth to assimilate it and humanity into itself.
Biography[]
Overview[]
What the Meat truly is or its origins are completely shrouded in mystery. It is only known that it is an evil eldritch horror made of pure flesh that feasts on the energy of universes to survive and grow stronger. It does this by absorbing and assimilating any material that has the element iron in it, which means it's capable of consuming multiple sorts of machinery, living beings and even stationary objects like boxes. It has already assimilated entire universes over the cross of billions of years to the point of growing universe size.[1]
First Contact[]
The events of the game are set in a universe where humanity has developed hyper-advanced technology much earlier in its history, having built multiple colonies across the Solar System, the biggest ones being on Mars and the Moon. To reach these colonies faster, research to develop portals that could create wormholes between the planets has started, with the first successful one being fully developed in our satellite, the Moon.
An overly ambitious scientist with the name of Yuri Markov would eventually discover that portal techonology could also be used to travel to other dimensions. Knowing well this humongous discovery would cement his career as the ultimate scientist and researcher, he makes unauthorized experiments in his secret lab facility at the Moon's Tycho Crater to probe into these mysterious, unexplored realms.
Unbeknownst to him, this constant meddling acted as a giant signal to the Meat, who would now seek to invade our dimension.
However, since the man-made portals are not strong enough to handle the humongous mass of this entity, it could send only one cell of itself at a time.
The Infection[]
This cell would be later found by Yuri, who would utilize it for his own egregious experiments. He would test its capacities for consuming everything iron-related (including the iron found in human blood) and grow stronger from it, but it specifically craved the brain tissue of a smart being. The Meat would eventually break containment and assimilate Yuri into itself, giving him psychokinetic powers and turn him into a powerful being known as the Meat Prophet. Now being made its servant, Yuri begins to infect all the machinery and his co-workers inside the Moon, turning them into mindless monsters now bound to the hive mind.
Yuri would then break through the Moon portal to start a mass-scale invasion to Earth, with the intention of leeching huge amounts of energy to make the portal powerful enough to let the Meat enter our world and link its own dimension to ours, effectively marking a doomsday scenario.
A moon soldier called Sasha makes a distress signal to Earth's forces, who now then form a worldwife paralimitary alliance known as the Earth Counter Invasion Alliance (ECIF) to fight against the Meat.
Fight in the Moon[]
The infected Moon and Earth
The game follows ECIF soldier Vadim as he travels through multiple Meat-infested stages to hunt down the Meat Prophet. It can be seen the Meat has already started assimilating entire cities and causing millions of casualties of military and civilians alike. Vadim would eventually encounter Yuri at the top of the Institute of Teleportation skyscraper, where the Moon portal is found. Despite being a poweful foe, Yuri would eventually fall to the tenacity of our hero. Frustrated, he would make the fatal mistake of using the energy meant for the portal to finish off Vadim, angering the Meat, which would send a mouth-tentacle to drag Yuri to the Moon base and use him as a battery to salvage itself.
Even with Yuri gone, the Meat was still a looming threat as it was feasting from the Moon's own iron core[2] and sending Meat meteors to impact over Earth, so Vadim crosses the meat-infested portal to reach to the Moon basen and end the driving force once and for all.
The infected Moon's destruction.
After reaching Markov's former secret lab, Vadim finds the Iron Meat, an amalgamation of the original Meat cell that crossed over our dimension and the foundations of the Moon base shaped as an unnerving, skeletel, giant humanoid monster. He would destroy this walking carcass to expose the command brain inside of it. Since the Meat couldn't infect Vadim due to his specialized titanium armor[3], it would form muscle across Vadim's legs to march him back and forth in a last ditch attempt to kill him from falling projectiles, but this would prove to be useless. With the command brain destroyed, this sets a chain reaction that would destroy all the infected individuals and objects telepathically tied to it. Sasha, the moon soldier who sent the S.O.S signal at the beginning of the game, appears and triggers a self-destruct countdown with the hopes this would destroy the remaining Meat in the Moon for good. Both heroes make their escape through a ship and the Earth forces re-gain control of Earth, beginning a cleansing operation to burn down all the remaining Meat debris so it couldn't reform itself.
However it is possible the Meat isn't fully dead yet as one of the escape ships destined to Mars had already landed from the Moon, with the escape port surrounded by Meat debris.