Indie Focus: Spelunky

Spelunky is one of my favourite games on the Xbox 360. It’s one of a rapidly growing group of games that operate a little differently to most others. Where most games seek to control how things work for a specific experience, these games are largely randomly-generated and governed by rules as to how each element interacts with the others. These elements combine to create an unpredictable and unique experience that is nevertheless unmistakably of its own brand. This is called emergent gameplay.

These are the kind of games that create stories that you share with other fans, they’re the stories you tell to your friends when you try to convince them to play the game. I call them war stories and I’ve talked about them before. In Minecraft it’s when you were exploring a cave and came across three open walled dungeons next to each other, in Left 4 Dead it’s the witch you ran into because a tank had appeared behind the survivors, and in Spelunky it’s the snake in the jar you broke without thinking that knocked you to your death on some spikes below.

[drop]It’s a roguelike side-on platformer in which you will delve into a cave in the middle of a desert in search of loot. At first you’ll play through the tutorial which will introduce you to basic aspects of the game. This includes everything from picking items up by crouching and pressing x to taking the damsel to the exit to regain health. You begin the game with four hearts and you lose them as you get hit by things. How many you lose depends on what hits you – a small spider will cost you one heart, an arrow from an arrow trap costs two, whilst landing on spikes is an instant kill. The only way to replenish health is by getting a kiss from a damsel, which you’ll get after taking her to the exit of the floor you’re on and following her through.

You can also get a kiss at a small kissing booth which has a chance of spawning randomly on the floor. There’s a damsel waiting inside ready to give you a kiss for some of your hard earned cash. Naturally, you get money by collecting treasure, whether it’s on the floor, in the floor (which you get at by blowing that particular part of floor up) or from getting a golden idol to the end of the floor (more on that later). This money can be used to buy things from shops, including kisses and tokens for a prize-giving spinning wheel. You don’t want to spend too long on a floor collecting treasure, though, as after two and a half minutes a giant, indestructible ghost will appear that kills you on contact.

As you complete the floors you descend further into the caves and encounter different environments. Each environment has four floors, different challenges and different secrets. The first is a cave, the second is an underground jungle, and so on. As you descend things get more difficult, partly because it’s genuinely just more difficult, but mostly because each environment brings new enemies that you’re less familiar with and new obstacles to traverse.

Thankfully you’re not completely without help. In addition to the bombs and climbing rope you start with that can be replenished by finding or buying more, there are plenty of items for you to find that will help you out. The climbing gloves, for example, will let you grab onto walls, whilst the cape will slow your descent when falling and the mattock can be used to destroy blocks (every level is fully destructible if you manage to find enough bombs and time to do so). Some of these items, such as the bombs, ropes and the cape, are passive and are part of your inventory, whilst others, like the mattock, must be held in your hands and can only be carried one at a time.

Of course, the enemies you encounter are going to be as much a challenge as the obstacles. Spiders drop from the ceiling when you pass below them, so keep your eyes up, arrow traps shoot at you if you go in front of them, so keep watching the wall, and some piles of bones reanimate into skeletons when you get near them, so keep your eyes on the floor. So basically just watch absolutely everything at all times. Not a problem at all.

[drop2]Spelunky is one of my favourite games. Its one that keeps me coming back every once in a while and playing a lot for a week or so, then I go away for a little while before playing again, even now at least a year after purchase. It’s challenging, fun and downright hilarious – it’s the escalating dangers that make it funny. One small mistake results in three others happening because of a chain reaction, like that snake in the jar you broke that knocks you off a ledge onto some spikes.

You can buy Spelunky from Steam for £11.99 (or £10.79 at the time of writing with 10% off) or GOG for $13.49 (at the time of writing, that’s $1.50 off), which is about £8.69. It’s also available from XBLA for 1,200 Microsoft points, which is around £11 somewhere if I’m not mistaken.  It will also be releasing on PSN for PS3 and Vita at some point this Summer. You can download the free original for Windows from the official site.

Bear in mind that the Steam version of the game has a daily challenge mode, which is a dungeon to work your way through and set a high score to compete with people online via leaderboards. None of the versions of the game have online multiplayer, but they do have local multiplayer in both cooperative and deathmatch modes.

Below is a video of a Youtuber called Northernlion playing Spelunky, because watching Spelunky is far more hilarious than watching a trailer.