Spelunky: Criticisms and the Downsides of RNG Prep Stages
Spelunky HD: Released August 8th, 2013
Cost: $14.99, Disc Space Size: 200 MB
Spelunky World Website Steam Page
Review
8/17/20 7:34 PM CST
I'm aware that I'm drafting this from a sense of entitlement, having never designed any games or anything creative myself as of the time of writing this. For full disclosure, I'm also in the process on reading this game's autobiography (Derek Yu's Spelunky from Boss Fight Books) and I have also yet to beat the final secret-level boss.
Although I did come the closest towards doing so earlier today.
Take note of that Total Deaths count and the session play time (31 minutes, and 3273 total deaths at time of screenshot. We'll come back to this later.)
All that said, I'll likely revisit the subject in the future once more. With all that out of the way:
At least by today's standards, Spelunky is not a great game. I would hesitate to call it "good;" it's a decent game with some phenomenal features. The physics in the game are fun. The controls are tight, there's enough variety that replaying through stages isn't tedious from lack of variety, the graphics are nice. The soundtrack for Spelunky is good (and at times excellent) but once you reach a certain point in the game you will likely turn it off for redundancy. The story that exists is great, with a surprising number of cultural and mythological tie-ins that constitute the main story elements. Some sense of progression even exists (in fact, writer and literary genius Philip J Reed's article on the Tunnel Man Key inspired me to pick this game up in the first place), and achievements are also present (I didn't experience these firsthand, as I played a copy of the game not within Steam, the PSN or XBLA.)
So what's wrong with it?
Spelunky suffers from a host of small issues, oversights and bugs that were never fixed in the official game. Some of it may be by design; skeletons and other monsters cannot be jumped on-top of underwater to kill; damage is taken. Cobras will often spawn level with the shopkeeper, at a depth where you're unable to defeat it before it aggros the shopkeepers for the rest of the game. Other parts might purely be bugs; the secret item "hedjet" doesn't always pick up, and on one occasion, I encountered a level with no clear path through the mines to the exit without using a bomb or a rope.
These are just some of the issues I encountered--the Spelunky Wiki has listed several more bugs on their webpage.
The biggest issue in Spelunky is in how it handles the ghost.
The ghost appears in each level of Spelunky after two minutes pass. Once this condition is met, the ghost will appear level with the player from either the left or the right, depending on which side the player is closer to when it spawns.
Each gem in the stage that comes in contact with the ghost turns into a diamond that is worth $5000. For reference, gems in the first world will range between either $800, $1200 or $1600 when picked up normally.
And the ghost is incredibly easy to avoid, especially if you are already prepared.
To revisit an earlier point, I have died over 3,273 times at the time of writing this. The majority of those attempts were sessions that were 0-5 minutes long. Waiting 2 minutes for the ghost to appear per stage, so you can gain enough money to buy the necessary items from the secret shop, is excruciating. There's no reason that the player shouldn't be able to summon the ghost early with a button (maybe with the option toggle-able from the settings menu, or unlocked after the first player win.) Once the player identifies this as the most effective playstyle, half of the game becomes waiting for the ghost and running an obstacle course. There's only so much of that you can do before you're sick of ghost runs.
And yet... the game will punish you for not taking every gem you can carry. To clear the game's secret route, a 30-40 minute playtime would not be uncommon. If you don't have enough bombs, Olmec will likely kill you, breakout-style. If you don't have the paste item, Anubis is likely to kill you. Without the Kapala, you're likely to have low health for the Temple stage. The compass will save resources and health after exploration no longer matters. The jetpack is a lifesaver.
Having to spend those two minutes waiting to avoid those headaches later on is poor game design. Regardless on if the ghost run playstyle was originally intended, it sometimes feels like the game expects more thought and patience than what was put into it.
A similar shortcoming in game design might be found within 60 Seconds! Reatomized. 60 Seconds! Reatomized is effectively two smaller games stitched into one; controlling either Ted or Dolores, you rush through your 3D-rendered house grabbing everything you can for your fallout shelter in 60 seconds, and then spend half an hour or so playing a text-based strategy game using what you grabbed.
Its hardest difficulty, "Tsar Bomba," is comically difficult. I've completed it only once (with the siblings ending), and from my experience you're at a vast advantage if you play as Ted, and either the suitcase or Mary Jane spawn right beside the trapdoor. In doing so, you're able to pick up 3 items while barely having to nudge inside the "safe zone" as the time expires.
Receiving this map load-out to make this gif took me about 15 minutes of resets, as per my recordings. But this is still the quickest and "least-frustrating" method of beating the game.
For 60 Seconds! Reatomized, aside from toggling that specific object's RNG, no easy remedy comes to mind. For the Spelunky ghost run, all that would need to be done is to enable a hotkey (or a menu button) to skip a timer.
Another complaint that seems trivial but is surprisingly irritating after 3,273 deaths is the lack of an "exit game" option on the Game Over screen. To exit the game, you either have to respawn on another attempt ("Retry") or warp back to an almost-entirely-useless hub area ("Continue"), and then find it through the pause menu. It's a patronizing annoyance, at least on the PC version, and I've found myself "Control Alt Deleting" myself off the game multiple times out of frustration.
Underneath these massive inconveniences there's a fun experience to be had, despite all these criticisms.
Ratings:
Spelunky: 7/10
60 Seconds! Reatomized: 3/5