Spelunky 2
PC, PS4
Environments are alive with detail, better disguising the game’s tilebased nature
Developer Mossmouth, Blitworks
Publisher Mossmouth
Format PC (tested), PS4
Release September 15 (PS4), September/October (PC)
The walls are shifting once more, and our cogs are whirring along with them. More than almost any other Roguelike, Spelunky forces your mind to work overtime as you play. In that regard, its successor is no different. Seemingly every few seconds it demands you make a judgement call, to ask yourself a question and hope that your brain and your fingers can collectively come up with the answer – and quickly, since you can rarely afford to hang about. Can we make that jump? Will the tikiman’s boomerang hit us when we drop? Should we throw that bomb into the spider’s web? Do we risk our last rope to reach that opening to the right? And is that a rideable salamander blowing bubbles down there? We can answer that last one, at least: no, it’s an axolotl, and just wait until you see what else it can do.
Once you’ve spent enough time with Spelunky 2, you’ll instinctively know the answers to those questions – and if you’re unsure of whether you can or should do something, it’s probably a no. If Derek Yu’s sequel raises a few new ones besides, that’s because there’s more of it: more characters, more enemies, more items, more areas. Which in turn means more systems, and more combinations of those systems: many logical, some guessable, others entirely unpredictable. If, as Roger Ebert said, movies are a machine that generates empathy, then Spelunky 2, even more so than the original, is a machine for generating surprise. And, inevitably, its close cousin: delight.
Granted, not all of those surprises are pleasant ones; indeed, many lead to a quick and brutal demise. Yu can be a strict teacher – though, admittedly, sudden death is certainly an effective way to ensure the player understands how lethal each new ingredient might be. At other times, it’s a useful reminder that, while dawdling is an invitation for a familiar ghost to make an appearance and chivvy you toward the exit, you rush through these dungeons at your peril. We speak from bitter experience: we have been pummelled, stung, crushed, poisoned, devoured, cursed, ensorcelled, impaled, stomped, melted and teleported into a wall. We’ll attribute some of those to rustiness; for others, it’s our old friend misfortune. The rest of the time it’s simply because the environment is different and the enemies are new, and becoming fluent in Spelunky 2’ s language is going to take a little longer now it’s added so much more to its vocabulary.
Even so, it begins with the same verbs. Your run and jump are still reliably precise. Your bombs, as ever, let you make swifter progress through these procedurallygenerated levels when the set route to the bottom looks too dangerous. You can throw up climbing ropes to get back up to higher ground or to lower yourself slowly when a drop would be harmful or fatal. And until you get your hands on a better weapon by either buying or stealing from a shopkeeper, your trusty whip can kill small enemies while stunning and knocking back larger ones. None of that needed to change, and so Yu has sensibly left well alone. Seasoned spelunkers in particular will quickly feel at ease.
There are plenty of changes elsewhere, however, not least a substantial visual overhaul. Yu hasn’t abandoned some of the more iconic original designs, but characters and creatures alike are more expressive. You’ll see exertion on your explorer’s face as they push through a sticky web, which itself offers more tangible resistance. Environments are more alive with detail, better disguising the game’s tile-based nature, while deviously masking the odd trap or secret. The new biomes offer characterful variants on familiar tropes, the pick of the bunch somehow finding a cohesive blend of Eastern and underwater themes, with Chinese temples surrounded by coral and anemones, and populated by crustaceans.
There’s a charming new hub, too. As before, you’ll unlock new adventurers (including some old faces now afforded full names and bios) by liberating them from coffins. But rather than simply adding more options to a character select screen, new friends now take up residence around the entrance. Those empty rooms give you greater encouragement to rescue more, so you can develop this cosy enclave into a bustling little in-game community. The story setup makes your mission feel more altruistic: set 15 years after the original, it sees young Ana Spelunky venture to the Moon to find her parents, who’ve been tempted underground once more by evidence of Olmec’s reappearance. And the journal entries documenting your progress are encouraging: they’ll note how close you came to reaching a new area, celebrating the fact that you progressed further than ever before, and congratulating you when you beat your previous high score. All of which soothes some of the pain from an agonising defeat, such as when you fall just short of the exit that would have brought you to Terra Tunnel and a brand-new shortcut.
Those moments still sting, but progress in Spelunky 2 isn’t just measured by how deep you go on each attempt – not when there are mysteries and epiphanies from the very first floor. Look closely and you’ll find entryways: some in plain sight, others tucked away, still more that require explosive help or the intervention of a large enemy to access them. Step through and you’ll find caves and hidden passageways, giving you a greater sense of a world beyond – or at least behind – the place you’re currently exploring. Past the impenetrable bedrock, you might glimpse another room in the corner of the screen, leading you to duck back out and investigate where the entrance might be.
That’s assuming you haven’t been distracted by the other new features. Pillars rise and fall when you hit switches, opening up new routes or giving you a new
way to trap or crush enemies. And though they can’t match up to Noita’s physically simulated pixels, dynamic fluids adds another welcome layer of unpredictability. You might place a bomb beneath a magma pit and watch it cascade down onto enemies below, albeit with the added complication of making your own escape route more hazardous. You can drain huge pools of water, too – in our case for the sole purpose of taking revenge on a particularly bothersome flying fish. Watching it flop around hopelessly on dry land proves a source of great delight during an otherwise disastrous run.
Opportunities for petty mischief are even more plentiful. After a bouncer on the door of a shop blasts us in the back with a shotgun for having the temerity to roll snake eyes, we return to the scene of the crime, carefully placing a bomb to blow up a portion of the back wall so we can retrieve the prize behind the electrical barrier. We’re not sorry for luring all those pesky monkeys to their deaths, either, although at one point we find ourselves mumbling an apology to a pug we inadvertently sacrifice during a desperate retreat.
It’s rare that a Spelunky 2 session doesn’t cause us to gasp in horror or amusement. The sharpest intakes of breath are the inevitable result of a run coming to a sudden end – though it’s often followed by a wry smile, or accompanied by a genuine belly laugh. On one run, we collect a shamrock, prompting the legend “You feel protected!”, only for a sleeping caveman to wake up and barge us into a spike pit. Three runs later, we’re idly browsing a store’s wares when a lava blob wanders in, prompting the shopkeeper to get out his shotgun. We leap up just in time, the blast sending hot magma into the turkey we were riding, instantly turning it into an oven-ready meal that we scarf down for a health boost.
Yes, among the happy accidents, there are a few unhappy ones. What can we realistically learn from a random lava bubble plopping down out of nowhere just as we’re placing a bomb? And sure, it’s funny when our hired help sees us struggling to get a monkey off our back and decides the best way to intervene is to hurl a rock at our head. But we can’t shake the feeling we’re suffering more unfair deaths this time: in seeking to bury his sequel’s secrets even deeper, we wonder, has Yu ensured more players will bounce off it sooner? And yet when we pause, take a breath and hit restart, we find ourselves reassured. It’s a small price to pay: the systems that collide to create those bitter ends are the same ones that have us marvelling at the stories they generate elsewhere, that force us into spontaneous yet consequential choices that ripple ever downward.
When chances are that something curious, shocking or hilarious – probably all three – will happen next time, the decision to restart is an easy one, even knowing we might find ourselves more frustrated than elated by the outcome. Besides, a dozen mysteries still await us, and there are many more we’ve not even begun to figure out. What’s the deal with that entrepreneurial caveman? What of those three green-haired sisters in the jungle area? And Yang Jr’s ‘one-way door’ warning? Before we get to any of them, we see a gleaming jewel lying between the open jaws of a giant clam. We know the risk, and Derek Yu knows we know it. That gem is Spelunky 2, every facet reflecting our mistakes and mishaps back at us, daring us to go again. As ever, we’re powerless to resist.