It also summoned the Ghost, a seemingly invincible enemy that will stalk and kill players if they take more than a few minutes to complete a level. Each level is also guaranteed to have one Ghost Pot-the first time I broke one open, I was delighted to find a diamond inside. As before, there are lots of jars and pots strewn around Spelunky's levels that can include gold, jewels, or the occasional enemy. One new item that's instantly soured many of my runs is the Ghost Pot. Paradoxically, that encourages careful play while also pushing players to keep moving lest something go very, very wrong wherever you happen to be standing. Thanks to Spelunky 2's expanded and interlocking systems, it also feels like runs can deteriorate a lot faster than before. Moles and horned toads will dart at players quickly, and god help you in your early runs if the randomly generated levels throw groups of them at you. Some early enemies are far faster than I anticipated, however. These foes haven't changed all that much, though I did find myself either needing to adapt to their different behavior or to changes made to Spelunky 2's whip (worry not, whipping behind your head is still possible). Once again starting out in a series of mines, I found familiar enemies like bats, spiders, and snakes. If you're not light on your feet, the first levels in Spelunky 2 will punish you for it. You can swap that back in the controls settings if you like, but the tweak actually prompted a change in my play style I desperately needed. Running is now enabled by default, with walking bound to a button. In the tutorial, one thing that will immediately leap out to returning spelunkers is how fast the sequel is. Items can be taken from level to level and world to world, but if you die and restart, nothing stays with you beyond any unlockable characters you've found along the way. Along the way, players can find or buy helpful items, like a freeze ray or a backpack that boosts the power of weapons and bombs. From there, Spelunky 2 has you forge a path through randomly generated levels built from different tile, trap, and enemy sets for each world. Players begin with four health, four bombs, four climbing ropes, and a whip at their disposal. The core fundamentals of Spelunky are, for the most part, unchanged in the sequel. Jarring as these changes can be, though, a lot of the design choices made in Spelunky 2 have the ultimate effect of making it feel new again, bringing back feelings of overwhelming challenge coupled with thrilling discovery. Spelunky 2 is one of those rare sequels with the confidence to change things in ways that will probably be a bit off-putting to many fans of Spelunky and the 2008 freeware game Spelunky Classic before it. My early, ill-fated cave runs had me thinking of Mario's tricky poison mushrooms, but after dying, dying again, and dying some more, my mind's less hung up on difficulty and back to buzzing about Spelunky in a way that it hasn't in years.ĭerek Yu, Spelunky's creator and founder of Mossmouth, has pulled off something miraculous here with co-developers BlitWorks. Spelunky 2, by contrast, has me unlearning those rules because of its new quirks and deeper mysteries. Also, though I do think some choices will lead many to conclude that Spelunky 2 is harder than what came before it, I need to remind myself that dying over and over again was core to my early experience with the previous game too.īack then, I was learning Spelunky's rules. For one, while Spelunky 2 builds upon its predecessor's super-tight roguelike platforming and reuses a lot of the same places, enemies, and items, it's incredibly expansive in terms of scope and ambition. Now, after hundreds of deaths and-I'm a bit shocked to say-seeing the credits roll, comparing Spelunky 2 with the Lost Levels doesn't seem as apt. Just as the first moments of playing the notoriously tough Lost Levels can come as a shock to anyone expecting it to play like Super Mario Bros., Spelunky 2 kicks things off by subverting hard-set ideas of how Spelunky works. As someone who's been playing Spelunky on and off since the Xbox Live Arcade release in 2012, the sequel's immediate leap in difficulty threw me off in much the same way. In my first few hours with Spelunky 2, my mind kept drifting to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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