Musings on... Spelunky

Having begun its life as a free downloadable game on PC (still available, in fact), Spelunky is a brutally-challenging platformer, in which you play as one of (initially) four adventurers as you attempt to progress deeper and deeper through a series of randomly-generated levels. It was updated to an HD version and released on Xbox 360 in 2009, and a new version was released on PC, via Steam, in August 2013.


The basic mechanics are simple. You can run, jump and climb, and start the game with four bombs and four ropes. You kill enemies either with your whip or by jumping on them, Mario-style. Each enemy presents its own challenge: spiders who drop from the ceiling, hoping to prey on unwary Spelunkers, or snakes that slither back and forth in classic platformer style. As well as this you'll contend with various traps, from dart traps to spike pits to tiki traps that stab you with spears if you get too close.

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So far, so standard platformer, but in Spelunky it's the way all of these different systems interact with one another that creates the real game. Many enemies only activate if you trigger them - for example by walking under spiders or getting too close to the skeletons that come to life - and as such you can often plan how you plan to get past them before you progress. Caution and careful thought are the orders of the day in this game, which won't hesitate to instantly kill you for reasons that may have been beyond your control.

Most of these 'unfair' deaths will be as a result of the shopkeepers. Occasionally you'll find a shop, wherein you can buy useful items like extra bombs or jetpacks, and they're often a blessing if you find them during a tough run, or when you're loaded down with money. The flip-side is that the shopkeepers who run the stores are... temperamental, to say the least. Say, for example, you trigger an arrow trap, which fires across the level into a shop you couldn't see and enrages the shopkeeper. He'll blame you for the damage. Each keeper is armed with a shotgun and a fair amount of health, as well as being extremely quick. Apart from every single shopkeeper in the entire game now hating you and shooting on sight, from this point on a shopkeeper will spawn at the exit to each level as well. Unfair? Probably. Funny? Absolutely.

Almost every death in Spelunky will be funny in some way. Sometimes it merely causes a disbelieving stare as you attempt to comprehend what exactly just happened. In one game, for example, I was progressing through the mines when a bat on the other side of a solid wall spotted me (somehow) and started flapping its way towards me. At first I wasn't worried, but I watched in horror as it slowly flew straight into the explosive crate I was standing slightly too close to, setting it off on impact and blasting me to the moon. And it was funny. I laughed. And started another game.

Spelunky does a good job of making you want to keep playing. Each level is almost entirely randomly generated, with the only constant being that there will be a path to the exit. This means that even if you keep dying within the first four levels (before the setting changes) you'll still be having a different experience every time, which is great!

A nice addition to the Steam version of the game is the Daily Challenge. This is a level which is the same for everyone who plays it, allowing you to track how well you perform on a level against friends or anyone else that's had a go at it. And you can only play it once, so it suddenly means a lot more. It changes the way the game is played, as there's no opportunity for experimentation any more. You need to know the systems as well as you can, you'll need to take advantage of any possible opportunities, and you'll need a healthy does of luck. The Spelunky Explorers Club, which has many notables in the games and games-journalism industries signed up, is a great way to track your own progress, and see how you responded to the levels in similar or different ways to the players you're watching.

So it should be evident that I'm giving this a pretty glowing review, and I recommend that everyone buy it pretty much immediately. There's four-player local co-op and deathmatch as well, which I've heard is fun but haven't tried yet. Also take heed that the PC port is a bit rough, and I would certainly recommend using a controller if possible.

Spelunky is a platformer created by Mossmouth founder Derek Yu. It is available on Xbox Live Arcade for £8.99, or on Steam for £11.99.