I started playing Spelunky– the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to have bounced off Spelunkyafter my first handful of deaths.
Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunkycareer surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again, wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time again.
That summer, Taz moved to the UK. We spent the first month literally living in my office, cooking dinner on a portable camping stove and using college showers, because we didn’t have anywhere else. Our days were taken up with trying to find a flat we could rent, along with wedding planning, setting up bank accounts, and all the other jobs that breed from the dead land when someone moves country. I showed her Spelunkyas a curio – this is the game I was complaining to you about back in March! – and promptly fell back into the same pattern: die, throw up hands in exasperation, quit, sneakily restart half an hour later because thistime I’ll know not to…
ReplayingSpelunkynever palls, because its levels are randomly-generated. They follow the same narrative arc every time – there are always four Mine levels, then four Jungle levels, and so on in predictable strata down to the boss – but each level is spawned afresh from a procedural generation system so clever it still feels to me like magic. I have never, in thousands of games, seen a level spawn in such a way as to be impossible. (This may well be quite simple to achieve if you understand computers, but let me keep my peasant’s awe.) If you played Level 1 a hundred times in an old-school platformer, you would eventually come to know it so well that it would be boring; you’d be able to play it by muscle memory, without really paying attention. If you play Level 1-1 in Spelunkya hundred times, that’s a hundred completely new challenges, but – crucially – all requiring the same set of mechanical skills. If you’ve mastered the reflex of catching the edge of a platform so you don’t fall far enough to take damage, you can use it to make your life easier and expand your available options in basically every single level from then on. It’s almost like learning a language: if you know the forms of a certain verb, you can recognise it wherever it turns up, not just in the one specific piece of text where you originally encountered it.
Taz and I started rewarding ourselves for completing difficult or annoying jobs with a quick burst of Spelunky.At first we’d take turns: I’d die, then she’d die. Later we hit on an accidental masterstroke, and started playing alternate levelsrather than alternate games. I’d play 1-1, then hand over to her for 1-2 (easy to manage, because when you finish one level the game doesn’t move on to the next until you tell it to – a tiny but important design choice). Playing like this fundamentally alters the experience. Normally, if you’re taking turns with a game you both enjoy, some part of you always wants the other player to hurry up and die so you can have another go. But in Spelunky, at least once you get past your earliest failures, the important thing is as much howyou finish the level as whether you finish it at all. Do you reach the exit on full health, with a well-stocked reserve of bombs, the spike boots, and the pickaxe? Or do you reach it with a single heart remaining, having idiotically lost the shotgun because you got stunned by a bat and dropped it into a spike pit? So you become tremendously invested in the other player’s success, because the better they do, the easier time you’re going to have on the next level – and you become intensely careful of your ownsuccess, because if you lose health or items pointlessly, you’re taking them away from your partner. “Sorry,” I’d moan, handing over to Taz after a spectacular last-second fuckup cost me (and therefore her) two hearts and our last rope. “It’s cool!” she would always tell me, kindly.
Welp, can’t see anything bad in this bit of ooohhhh my GOD
This gradually developed into a kind of mutual artistic appreciation. We would watch each other in near-total silence, no backseat driving, occasionally murmuring “Nice” or “Not your fault” in response to dramatic moments. The level would end and we’d both relax, and hand over the laptop with a brief post-mortem: “I’m really sorry, that crate was a waste of time. I should have just left it.” “Nah, it was a good call. Could have been bombs.” Or just the purely aesthetic: “That jump was gorgeous,” I remember her telling me once, with the meaningful admiration of the expert who knows how difficult what you just did actually was. We learnt each other’s habits, too. Taz is always a little more flamboyant than me, a little more prone to leaps of faith. On a good day she’ll effortlessly swing moves I’d never have dared attempt, but one mistake shakes her confidence and she starts making more. I’m clinical and neat to a fault, but I waste time vacillating: I can get that crate – no, it’s too hard – no, I canget it – but then I’ve lost five seconds, and at the ninety-second mark the ghost appears and things get a lot harder. Taz is an artist with the climbing gloves, which I irrationally loathe, but gets timid with the shotgun because she doesn’t calculate the recoil. I depend near-fetishistically on the spike boots, and will mutter doom-laden prophecies if we haven’t found some by the end of 2-4. She hates the Black Market; I hate the Worm.
(Spelunkyhas no on-screen timer. We both know, almost to the second, when ninety seconds is nearly up, based on nothing but habituation and the background music.)
Four years later, we no longer play Spelunkynearly as much as we used to. Sometimes months will pass and we never touch it at all. But we’ve played enough now that the skills are written deep, so when we return to it, we’re a little rusty but we bounce back fast. And we always do come back to it, in the end. I wouldn’t honestly call either of us good at it, even after all that practice: we’ve reached Hell, the secret area, maybe a dozen times, but we’ve still never beaten the secret boss. We don’t use any of the strategies that mark out serious players, like ghostrunning or deliberately looting the Market. We read about the Solo Eggplant Run, a feat so perversely difficult to achieve that the designers didn’t realise it was possible, with the wide-eyed excitement of two kids on the primary school football team watching the World Cup final. But we’re just good enough to feelgood – to ride the high of a patiently learnt skill being pushed to its limit, the sugar rush of competence as we drop under a psychic blast and skip straight over a crush trap while sticking two bombs squarely to Anubis’ horrid snout.
It’s probably not the last time I’ll say this, but I’m not sure why I love this game so much. I don’t generally gravitate towards games that depend on reflexes and speed – I like my combat turn-based and my timers non-existent – or towards games whose adherents say ‘yeah, you have to get good to really understand how good it is’. (Not that I regard the latter as an unworthy or undesirable quality in a game! I just have very little confidence in my own ability and am easily scared off.) Aesthetics are certainly important. I’ve never mustered the courage to play Dark Souls, because it looks so big and Gothic and intimidating that it seems to growl HARDCORE PLAYERS ONLY, and I found Binding of Isaac too cruel and scatological to enjoy, with its nostalgie de la boue for flies and worms and blood and shit (all rendered in a faux-adorable style). Spelunkylooks like I think adventures should look: deep and rich, with sinister idols and jewels and flaming torches. But there’s also just something about its remorseless clarity; its careful fairness (all rules are consistent, and if something hurts you it will generally hurt enemies too); its absolute mechanical predictability. I love transparent games – the kind that set everything out right there in front of you, look you dead in the eye, and wink. Spelunkycan surprise you, but it shouldn’t. After you’ve played a few games you ought to be able to see everything coming. You won’t, of course, but that means when you die you don’t say: what? Why did THAT happen? You say: oh God, I forgot about the arrow trap, didn’t I? It was right there and I forgot about it. Next time I will definitely not forget about arrow traps.
And then you push the button, and start again.
[Spelunkyis available from GOG for £11.39, Steam for £10.99, and probably from various other places too. It’s also on XBLA and PSN. You can play the original lo-fi version for free; I’ve never tried it, so I’m not sure how exactly they compare, but the gameplay seems to be very much the same.]
This started off as a quick little perspective exercise of one of the Spelunky arrow traps and it turned out so well I decided to colour it. Hope you like it! -Dale
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