This time, I tell myself. This time I’ll see the arrow traps before I jump into their path. This time I’ll time that step and not end up impaled on spikes. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get through the opening stages with all hearts intact and a bag full of bombs.
Then a mole rat tunnels out of the ground and knocks me into the path of a large lizard that looks a lot like a certain Presidential figure, only a bit less abhorrent, and that then punts me into the wall over and over, my lifeless body now in some grim game of squash.
That was the 15th attempt at beating the roguelite adventure Spelunky 2 on that particular evening. I had previously scraped and clawed my way deeper into the ever-evolving moon caves, almost tasting victory. This time I’d fallen at the first hurdle, merely 20 seconds into the run. I would have to start from the top yet again. I couldn’t count how many times since the game released that I’d had to restart, but it was certainly a lot. In some cases, that would warrant a shout of angry frustration.
But I laughed.
I laughed because there’s a dark comedy to the constant, random, and almost unfair, manner in which Spelunky 2 kills you. As with the original Spelunky, you pick an adventurer, and try to get to the bottom of an increasingly difficult set of changing caves without perishing, all in the pursuit of some lifting a strange curse that afflicts anyone who sets foot in the caves. If, sorry, when you die, you come back to life at the entrance again and again until you finally escape the curse. It’s sort of like Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Happy Death Day.
The Happy Death Day comparison is especially apt as the cycle of jumping in with a bit more knowledge each time, hoping to break out of this deathloop, is similar, as are the initial results. Just when you think you have it all figured out, Spelunky 2 hits you with some absurd variation on what you know, and there’s your twitching corpse slowly sliding down a set of spikes because you didn’t see that spider drop down from the ceiling.
Never has a game had such wonderful comedic timing for my imminent failure. Sometimes it’s a surprise scorpion in an item box. Another time it could be a misunderstanding at the item shop that leads to the shopkeeper coming for murderous vengeance with his shotgun. The beauty of Spelunky 2 is that you genuinely never know what your next cause of death will be, no matter how many times you go through it. That should be a clear route to frustration and annoyance, but there’s a grisly curiosity about what fate has in store for you this time that almost matches the desire to ‘win’.
There are times it seems like Spelunky 2 can read my mind. One time, on a rather successful run, I think ‘I’ve got loads of bombs, extra life hearts, and this snazzy jetpack. I’m gonna breeze this next stage’, only for my casual jet-fueled descent to be bludgeoned coldly by a fire-breathing dog that sets off a chain reaction of calamity.
The fireball from that hellhound’s maw knocked me back, thankfully onto solid ground. I get up, and move just in time to avoid a menacing metal cudgel that drops from above on a long chain, and drives through the floor next to me. A near miss! My luck is surely in?
In a split second, I notice that there’s lava now pouring through the gap below me, covering the floor. That will make any escape to the exit tricky as just touching a dollop of it means instant death. So I move in the opposite direction, hoping to blow my way out elsewhere with my plentiful supply of bombs.
Unfortunately, I don’t see that one of the game’s neanderthal-like enemies had clocked my less than gracious landing, and is now barreling toward me like a meaty battering ram. I panic, fumble with the button input, and fling a bomb in his direction without thinking about the consequences. The bomb hits him, stunning him briefly, but it puts him and the bomb in close proximity to me. Either I risk rushing past into potentially unseen danger before I blow myself up, or I risk trying to find a way to the exit in the increasingly lava-filled floor in the other direction.
I choose the latter because there’s no time to think beyond ‘I can at least see what I’m getting myself into’ and I leap to a platform just the other side of the lava spill. That’s when the bomb explodes and sends the caveman’s corpse my way at speed. He knocks me off my perch, and onto the floor below. I lose some health from the impact and the subsequent drop, but I’m still alive and as it turns out, not far from the exit.
A brief moment of relief as I once again feel confident of pushing on deeper into the caves. Then another cudgel drops and obliterates me just before the exit. All that happened in seconds. I sit slack-jawed at the ridiculous nature of my brutal demise. Final Destination’s Grim Reaper couldn’t have set up a sillier set of circumstances leading up to that death.
But I hit restart almost immediately, eager to begin the cycle once more. This time I might make it all the way, but if I don’t, I know there’s a good chance I’ll be dying a very dishonorable, and likely hilarious, death. Spelunky 2’s loop means I don’t really fear death and failure. Instead, there’s a morbid fascination with what untold bastardry it will throw at me in order to prevent my escape. Strangely, the only fear is that I’m going to escape the death traps, the monsters, the cavemen, the lava, and those bloody mole rats for good one of these days, and when I do, the wonder of an unknown fate that makes me love Spelunky 2 so much might vanish.
But really, I believe my eventual victory lap will probably end up with me doing something masterfully stupid in the opening level, as the game concocts another of its devious schemes to help dispose of me in the most humiliating, but amusing, way possible.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3642720/spelunky-2-kills-love/
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