Spelunky

Spelunky Wiki

Remember when dying in a video game meant something? It can be a bit hard to recall these days, when the most popular games 'punish' death by restarting the player at an autosaved checkpoint 15 seconds prior, or making them wait five seconds before respawning for more multiplayer shooting. But there was a time, just a few decades ago, when making only a few errors in a game meant starting that game over from the very beginning.

It may seem cruel to the modern gamer, but back then, this kind of punishing design was a technological and business necessity. Designing death to be a true 'game over' was a way to compel more quarters from players standing in front of the arcade cabinet, or to extend the life of console games whose length was limited by memory storage constraints. Spelunky sets those same constraints out of conviction, rather than necessity, and this one design decision transforms the game from an above average run-and-jump adventure into a meaningful, almost transcendent gaming experience.

Every step you take down Spelunky's sixteen cavernous levels is filled with the tension of knowing that a single mistake can send all your careful progress crashing down around you. You start each game with four 'hearts' of energy that you have to jealously guard against a wide variety of inventive enemies and traps, using only a whip and whatever other weapons and items you can buy with the gold you find scattered around. Most of these individual enemies are pretty simple to handle in isolation, but when you're only allowed four mistakes, even simple encounters suddenly become quite a bit more fraught.

And then there's the bevy of threats that kill you for making a single mistake. Step on a man-eating plant, linger near a spring-loaded spike trap too long, stand too close to an exploding frog, or lose your concentration around any number of other instant-kill hazards, and you're on your way back to level 1 to try again. You can eventually dig shortcuts that let you start over at the beginning of each of the game's four distinctly themed 'zones' instead, but you'll have to prove yourself with mistake-free play a number of times before you earn that privilege. With death just moments away at any point, the game forces you to pay attention rather than sleepwalking through even familiar territory.

This is a remake of the original Spelunky. Besides the updated graphics (which grant the often used title Spelunky HD), this release includes new enemies, music, areas, terrain, items and 11 new playable characters. It also includes a local 4-players co-op mode and a deathmatch mode. The controls we. Spelunky started in 2009 as an indie game, after an enhanced edition was released in 2012 the game captured a whole new audience and quickly became a popular game on both consoles and Windows. Spelunky challenges players to explore a series of randomised caves as they collect loot, dodge a variety of traps, watch out for enemies and ultimately.

The significant consequences for death also add a perverse twist to the tension between exploratory risk and reward. Is it worth jumping across that line of vines dangling over the pit of spikes to get to a room full of gold? Sure, you've traversed similar pits countless times, and that gold will be useful for buying items that will make later challenges much easier. But if you mess up this time, you'll be sacrificing your performance on the six perfectly executed levels you've already completed, and lose the 15 useful, wall-busting bombs you've accumulated this time through. A careful player will quickly learn that discretion is the better part of valor, and that even an eminently manageable level of risk should be avoided if at all possible.

There's always a moment of teeth-gritting frustration when one false step obviates all your careful work, but you'll end up blaming yourself for being distracted or careless much more than you'll blame the game for being unfair. Spelunky runs aren't massive, time-consuming affairs, either—an expert player can dash through all 18 levels in under eight minutes, with a little luck—so it's not like you've lost hours of toil with a single mistake.

While Spelunky's unforgiving design can erase your progress in a heartbeat, it can't erase the new sliver of knowledge and experience that you'll be eager to make use of the next time playing. Some players will doubtlessly find the game too maddeningly difficult to suffer through the growing pains, but those that stick with it will find great satisfaction as their knowledge and skill make tasks that were once difficult seem like a cakewalk.

Don't think that memorizing the level structure and trusting your muscle memory will eventually let you power through, though. Spelunky's caves are randomly generated with each new run. That means you'll see the same set pieces and enemies you've encountered hundreds of times before, but in new configurations that are just unfamiliar enough to keep you on your toes. Then there are the random environmental effects that can make levels even harder, by, for example, shrouding you in a pitch black level lit only by a handheld torch, or forcing you to swim through a lake filled with man-eating piranhas, or asking you to avoid an alien that fires psychic blasts at you from a buried spaceship.

These kinds of randomly generated twists, combined with the stringent difficulty and a gaggle of hard-to-find secrets, makes Spelunky a game you'll keep coming back to even if you manage to make it through to the end. Each new game is a chance to see a level arrangement you've never seen before, and maybe surpass a personal best for gold collection or completion time. And while each death erases your progress, it can't erase the memories of countless entertaining, frustrating, and joyous emergent gameplay situations. Like the time an angry shopkeeper ran out to beat you up after you accidentally ran a boulder through his shop. Or the time a yeti threw you into an icy bottomless pit just a few steps from reaching the 13th level for the first time. Or the time you finally had a shotgun handy to take out that monstrous killer bee, which gave you the extra energy needed to make it to the end of the game.

These are the kind of memories that can only be generated in a game where every moment holds the threat of serious in-game consequences. It's the slow accretion of experience and progress that makes each death in Spelunky so much more meaningful than indistinguishable death number 4536 in some Call of Duty firefight, and it will keep you coming back to the game for a long while.

Versioning note: Spelunky has also been available as a free PC download (which I've also played quite a bit) since 2008. The newly released Xbox 360 version updates the pixelated graphics with HD hand-drawn sprites, and makes some small but noticeable changes to the game design.

Spelunky Wiki

The Xbox 360 edition also adds a cooperative multiplayer mode that makes the difficulty a bit more manageable by splitting the risk among multiple explorers, and a competitive deathmatch mode that I found much too hectic and hard to follow to be much fun. While you can use a USB controller on the PC version, this is a game that seems better designed for couch play on a big living room TV, helping to make this the definitive version of the game.