I haven’t completed it. What I done is die, hundreds of times, in a variety of gruesome and hilarious ways. I’ve been impaled on spikes. I’ve been nibbled to death by piranhas and clobbered into oblivion by angry shopkeepers. I’ve blown myself up with bombs, I’ve fallen down cavernous holes and I’ve been stung to the core by a giant queen bee.
Death comes frequently in Spelunky. You’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes at yet another indie platformer with cute graphics and chirpy music – albeit one that goes out of its way to be as tough as possible. But the more you play, the more it surprises you.
For starters, death isn’t just frequent – it’s also permanent. There’s no saving in Spelunky. Get munched by a man-eating plant or stomped on by one too many frogs, and you’ll have to start again from the beginning.
But that’s OK, because the game fabulously re-arranges itself each time you play. Level layouts, enemy placements, pick-ups, loot and more – they’re all randomly generated, meaning that going back to the start never means re-treading old ground, but instead marks the start of a new adventure.
There’s a kind of magic at work in Spelunky’s re-forming caverns and mine shafts which allows each level to feel personally and meticulously crafted, even though it’s been built by maths. The positioning of every single tile and monster is immaculate, the multiple routes around each level all offer a perfected level of challenge and the game never backs you into a corner from which it’s impossible to recover.