![]() Turn on a YouTube video and watch someone run through a level. That “reading” is the skill that SPELUNKY 2 actively encourages, and it crystalizes when you watch anyone else play. And in playing the game, you learn how to read. Each level is randomly generated, yes, but you, the player, are consistent. ![]() As 2D Mario games have changed they’ve never lost one of their most important features, their legibility: basically the player’s ability to see the level and both infer what’s going to happen AND what they need to do. SPELUNKY 2 is very deliberately the SUPER MARIO WORLD to SPELUNKY’s SUPER MARIO BROS., most prominently with the inclusion of one Yoshi-esque mount among many, but also in the subtler ways it morphs and polishes the art style, game mechanics, and sound design into a familiar but new object worthy of study. It’s satisfying to move your character around, fling your whip and toss your bombs, just as much as it is to use Mario’s jump, but the magic comes from when these actions are combined with the very active game world full of creatures, destructible environments, and an occasionally inscrutable set of traps. Like its parent game, the sequel draws its power from the ease of taking another go, failing in increasingly complex ways and every so often figuring something out that might make you survive a little bit longer, or at least look “cool.” If the elegance of 2D Mario games comes from the handcrafted “you could lay it out on graph paper” quality of each level, the original SPELUNKY favored elegance in its interactions. “This is how I dodged that arrow…”, “This is how I dispatched that horned lizard…”, “This is how I made it all the way to the end with the Ghost Jar, but accidentally threw a bomb instead of a rope.” This blend of difficult but immensely attractive gameplay “moments” is produced by the game’s level generation, setting up what amounts to mini-narratives on each stage. The turkey is the first mount available and the one that points most directly to Yoshi. Or you’ll die at the hands of a scorpion that popped out of a jar. You’ll dodge arrow traps, punching totems, and a host of dangerous creatures all while the ever-present threat of the Ghost that haunts levels arrives to kill you before you can escape. ![]() While the randomly generated levels skew to some broader trends in the placement of treasure and shops, each run through the game is different, requiring similar but evolving strategies and your full attention to complete. ![]() The experience of playing SPELUNKY 2 can be defined by this kind of failure. While my slow crawl to the finish line is frustrating in comparison to the progress that the game’s community of streamers, game design experts, and roguelike masters continue to make digging up the game’s many secrets, this is as common to new players of SPELUNKY 2 as it was to players of the original. You take a breath and try and parse this strange world together again.Īlmost a month since release, I’ve yet to consistently reach the second of SPELUNKY 2’s many worlds. This world is immediately overwhelming and if you’re not familiar with each of its particular qualities, it quickly sends you bouncing to your death, a snapshot of your corpse immortalized in the game’s journal-styled menu. You take all of these things in one at a time. Walls with drawings that could (and likely do) denote something, constant motion, and-ever present in the top right corner-a timer counting up to… something. Brown dirt platforms interrupted by spike traps, strange boxes only randomly generated terrain could produce, and a host of squirming insects crawling over indifferent cavemen. At first glance it’s a mess of moving pieces.
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