One of the early levels. You control Indy, who is near the top of the screen.

Spelunky is a 2D platform jumper with "sprite" graphics, which might sound pretty typical so far, but the levels are randomly generated, and you only have one life and a few hit points, making it specifically a game of luck + survival, like Rogue. You will die over and over again, yet for some strange reason you'll want to keep playing (as I experienced with Prince of Persia 2). It serves as proof that the high stakes, "live fast, die young" approach to games, popular during the 80s, isn't always the wrong idea.

As with Cave Story, this game makes me feel like I'm playing a game from long ago, except that it's far better than presumed possible for that era. It reeks strongly of 80s games Spelunker (duh) and Montezuma's Revenge and Aztec. In fact, I'm really quite glad to see a game that takes all the good things from Aztec, for sadly, Aztec has not aged well over the years. Part of the reason these neo-retro games seem larger than life is obviously because technology limits have increased, but I also want to believe it's because video games as a culture have advanced to the point that ideas for what can and should be possible in a game have improved.

Spelunky is brutal. You have very limited resources at your disposal, so you have to be very cautious and prudent in order to survive. But sometimes luck turns against you and you die anyway. (The game taunts you by keeping track of the number of times you died.) It's a little bit like solitaire in that respect. While I'm playing this game, I cherish all the little things that I find once in a while, and I find myself wishing that I could get those things more often, or that I had just one more advantage, or that there was just one more little way I could feel I had some control over this desperate situation. It would be nice if I could carry a gun and that treasure at the same time. It would be nice if the stores weren't so ridiculously expensive. But then I realize that any of those changes would absolutely break the game by removing the challenge as it currently stands. Those games in the 80's didn't give you more advantages partly because of hardware limitations and partly because of collective imagination limitations. But Spelunky doesn't give you more advantages on purpose because it intentionally recreates the feeling of those older games.

Nowadays it's fashionable to design a game where you can do "anything". But Spelunky understands the foolishness of this approach and respects the boundaries of the scope it has imposed upon itself to succeed admirably. Well done, Spelunky. As for Derek Yu, well, I guess I can forgive you for Eternal Daughter, since this totally makes up for it.