It has plenty of personality in its friendly but fiendish art style, smooth animations, vividly colored areas, and oddball possibilities. Spelunky 2 offers up that combination of frustration and comedy in spades. It’s quite another to experience one for fun, to be able to turn it off when it’s frustrating and back on when one is ready for another run. It’s one thing to draft up a complex system. They’re played, and that’s where all kinds of human messiness creeps in. But games don’t stand on their own, existing only as pieces of potential interactions. At the end of the day, if games stood only on their own as pieces of software, they’d be very small, bounded objects. Sure, it would be possible to dig into Derek Yu’s source code to tease out all the possible interactions and their effects. ![]() ![]() But they are complex systems, nonetheless. They are heavily-authored systems, and so systems without a lot of the properties of more naturally occurring ones. Playing any of them is an experience of a complex system. In other words, Spelunky, and games like it, are some video-game-ass videogames. Here’s Simon attempting to provide a simple definition of a complex system: “In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole.” To make what is likely an overly-nerdy reference, even for this website, Spelunky (and, in a way, all roguelikes) are dreamscapes of economist Herbert Simon. Toss in the trade-offs of items, upgrades, sacrifices, and sidequests and there’s a lot to manage. All of those fantastic beings move within complex environments, themselves susceptible to its hazards and deathtraps. It’s also a more restrained game than most, even though it has yetis, lava monsters, vampires, telepathic aliens, a mishmash of archaeology, grave robbing, and icons from assorted mythologies. That sprawl and the resulting ways in which players can creatively break the game is part and parcel to its appeal. I think of The Binding of Isaac, which isn’t so much a single game as an expanding behemoth of cartoon body horror. Other roguelikes have tended to avoid direct sequels in favor of updates, expansions, and remasters, each adding new combinations and possibilities. Those rules are part of the appeal - discovering exactly what can and cannot be done makes run after run intriguing. Like other roguelikes, its levels are procedurally generated according to a sprawling (but, for the most part, internally consistent) set of rules. It’s a strange thing to make a sequel to a game like Spelunky. It took me years to finish it, but hardly years of in-game time. That handheld platform was a perfect setting for the game, letting me pick it up, play it, and put it right back down. Instead, I would play it feverishly, daily, for a few weeks at a time, mostly on my Vita. I don’t want to give a false impression, here: I did not continuously play the first Spelunky for several years in a row. I would bet that some of my frustration with Spelunky 2 comes from having played so much of the original, right up until the September release of its sequel. ![]() Many have been unsatisfying enough that, after they happen, I have hung up Spelunky 2 for the day in favor of some other game. I have to say, many of them have not been particularly satisfying. One-hit kills, deaths that result from getting stunlocked and tossed around by screens full of enemies and traps, or simple restarts of runs gone bad probably account for the bulk of those 100 deaths. Even if I do everything in the correct sequence, I usually wind up getting smoked by the dripping lava the drill inevitably tunnels through. Recently, I’ve taken to hunting the vampires that can be found after activating a large drill in a lava-filled mine. ![]() It helps that there are branching paths, but it also makes it all the more tricky to put together strategies. However, the game being what it is, I’ve seen plenty of variety in those areas. I haven’t made it past four areas of the game just yet, let alone to an ending. Spelunky 2 congratulated me with a small banner when I hit 100 deaths.
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