In fact, there’s an achievement for completing the game in under eight minutes (unlocked: ) as a permanent reminder. Temptingly dangled over your head is the promise that, when everything falls into place, the game is very short indeed. You might think dying over and over again is a pretty good incentive to call it a night, but you’d be wrong. That combines neatly with its ‘one more go’ charm. You learn to look before you leap swiftly, and if you forget that rule, the game will make you relearn it the hard way. Or perhaps you dawdled too long and fell victim to the one-touch-kills ghost that appears like clockwork after two-and-a-half minutes. Maybe you got too greedy and tried some overambitious parkour moves for a crate. You die a lot, but 99% of the time it’s your fault. Like the best brutally hard games, Spelunky walks the tightrope between punishing and unfair with impressive poise. In the world of Spelunky, the old idiom is subverted: what kills you ultimately makes you stronger. If you don’t get your favourite power-up – the climbing gloves that let you scale walls, say – then you’ll just have to make do with what you have and adapt, making the most of a bad lot. It can also send you straight into the wall, killing you instantly.īecause these elements are randomised, you can’t use them as a crutch. The teleporter can take you instantly through walls to unreachable places. Most have their drawbacks, though, so as not to make things too easy: the shotgun not only uses your hands, meaning you have to temporarily drop it to pick up anything else, but also has horrendous kickback, invariably knocking you into spikes if you’re not careful. The jetpack, for example, takes away the need for your limited quality of rope as you can simply fly to out-of-reach places, while the shotgun makes even the most terrifying enemy drop with a couple of shells. Then there are the power-ups, which can completely transform your abilities. Gradually you inch further forward, and things click into place as the grammar of the game seeps into your consciousness. With Spelunky, the levels and enemies will be different each time, so instead of memorising patterns, you’re forced to learn various strategies that can be applied to the hand you’re dealt. You know the order that things are coming, and when to press the buttons. In a traditional platformer, even the toughest stage can ultimately be overcome via a heady combination of perseverance and muscle memory. How has such a simple game got such longevity? The game has followed me across three console generations, four jobs, two house moves and, given I still play today, nearly a fifth of my life. On, I became one of the 1.3% of PlayStation gamers to make it out this way – but with plenty more deaths on the way.Įagle-eyed readers will have spotted a change of platform there and, no, it wasn’t a mistake. To do this, you need to grab something off each of the four main worlds, and then use them in a very specific way to find a secret exit out of the ‘final’ boss level, opening up a whole other deadly section. Y’see, Spelunky is a game with such rich depth and layered secrets that there’s an alternative ending: the Hell Run. Twelve days after that, I finally beat the game – something that only 2.4% of Xbox gamers managed, apparently.īut I didn’t stop there. One hundred and sixteen days later, I had died 1,000 times according to the “addicted” trophy – that’s an average of just under nine goes per day, maths fans. I got my first Spelunky Xbox 360 achievement on 16 August 2013. READ MORE: Investigating the hacking arms race at the heart of ‘Escape From Tarkov’.Over hundreds of hours of play, I’ve seen the poor Spelunky man impaled on spikes, explode into a thousand pieces, crushed by falling objects, eaten by man-eating plants, hurled against walls by over-friendly yetis, and shot by shopkeepers who, for some reason, don’t take kindly to being robbed. There’s something beautifully slapstick about Spelunky.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |