Spelunky 2
Finding a game capable of holding our attention for not just months but years is getting more difficult. Even putting aside all the new releases that extend our backlog into infinity, there are so many live-service games fighting to be our main squeeze that battle passes and seasonal updates have started to seem more threat than promise. But here’s one game that’s managed to consistently cut through the noise, simply by virtue of being difficult to master, endlessly surprising and – perhaps most vitally – only asking for 15 minutes at a time. Round here, the walls have never stopped shifting.
For all the experience that two years have brought, it’s rare that a dip into the Daily Challenge ends anywhere near the upper reaches of the leaderboard, or indeed the lower reaches of the caverns and temples beneath the Moon’s surface. But it’s become something of a head-clearing exercise, more akin to meditation than it would appear to an outside observer (we understand yogis are generally less given to shouting curses and flinging keyboards).
The arrival of crossplay multiplayer, in Spelunky 2’s first major update since 2021, allows us to backwardsengineer a justification for buying the game again every time it comes to a new format, but also opens up a new form of group meditation: two adventurers huddled on a sofa, one playing on the big screen, another via Steam
Deck. This is an ideal way to play: in the same room so that lamentations may be shared, but without having to share a camera, removing the danger of one player becoming easily stranded off-screen. Whether or not it helps us push any deeper than we’d achieve solo, though? Well, let’s just say that it’s complicated.
Playing with a friend is easier, since it breaks the cardinal rule of Roguelikes. Death isn’t the end, as long as the survivor can make it to their fallen comrade’s coffin and break them free, making it possible to relayrace your way to the Sunken City. It’s also considerably harder, since a second player doubles the number of unpredictable elements in a level. The double-edged ‘cooperation’ of a Hired Hand NPC has nothing on the exquisite mayhem caused by an actual human let loose with their own sack of bombs and a propensity for grabbing golden idols regardless of what they’ll unleash.
All the blame can’t be put on our companions, naturally – even the newcomers. We prepare to fill the role of inverted sherpa, dragging them all the way to the bottom. It turns out to be a sobering reminder that, for all the dozens of hours and hundreds of lives poured into Spelunky 2, we’re no less susceptible to the tricks and traps of its procedural generation than someone who has never seen them before. But this, ultimately, is what keeps us coming back again and again.