Spelunky 2

Environments are alive with detail, better disguising the game’s tilebased nature

- Derek Yu

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.