It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a godsend in a game where your very limited health is persistent from level to level and the only other reliable way of restoring it is by locating and bringing a lovable animal friend to the exit (alive). The most substantial leg up is that, if you’re okay with being a soulless monster, you can bomb turkeys for life-restoring cooked meat. Mossmouth does do a few small things to make the early goings of Spelunky 2 at least a tiny bit easier than the original. You get just the right amount of mid-air control to make pinpoint-accurate jumps with great speed, and just the right amount of leeway on timing to easily make jumps in tight spaces that would be extremely frustrating in a lot of platformers. It helps, too, that the controls are a dream. This feeling of getting better, and knowing that it's not because of anything but your own skills and knowledge, is incredibly powerful, and it makes Spelunky 2 one of the most rewarding video games I’ve ever played. But even though your character doesn’t get any stronger between runs, your brain is continually armed with new experience that can help prevent that same death from happening again… or at least if it does, you know it’ll be your own fault. Spelunky 2 is one of the most rewarding video games I've ever played.Dying is punishing, yes, as it causes you to restart all the way at the beginning and lose whatever powerful items you might have obtained in your previous life. What ends up happening is that the more you play, the more a visual language starts to take form that allows you to instantly recognize whether you can drop down without taking damage, if there’s something around that can be used to trigger an arrow trap rather than your own body, where you should use a bomb or rope to find an easier route down instead of taking the danger-filled main path, how far away you need to be in order to avoid harassment from the tiny ghosts surrounding the witch doctors, and so on. (Oh and you Spelunky pros who don’t fear the ghost and instead use it to increase the value of scattered gems, just know that’s not going to be quite as easy this time around.) To survive for long you have to read the room accurately – and do it fast. At the same time, the clock is always ticking: if you take more than three minutes on a level, a nigh-unstoppable ghost spawns and will relentlessly hunt you down. To survive for long you have to read the room accurately – and do it fast.Part of the genius of Spelunky’s design is that its randomization demands that you carefully examine each area so you don’t run head first into an arrow trap, or get bounced by an enemy onto an insta-death spike, or drop an ill-advised bomb where it will do more harm than good. It’s simple, sweet, and almost entirely disconnected from what you actually do. Not much of an emphasis is placed on the story, but the gist of it is that you play as Spelunky guy’s daughter, Ana, who goes to search for her parents on the Moon after they failed to return from their own expedition. Of course, the catch is that those levels are procedurally generated and impossible to predict, and in between points A and B are devious traps, nasty critters, and approximately 999 other ways to die horribly – and when you do die, in true roguelike fashion the world completely rearranges itself for the next attempt. Like its predecessor, Spelunky 2 is a seemingly simple and disarmingly cartoony 2D platformer that challenges you to get your stout little Indiana Jones-like character from point A to point B while collecting as much treasure and as many items as you can. Yes, it’s brutally and often hilariously difficult, but if you can learn enough of its secrets to push through that, you’ll be hard pressed to find a game as consistently rewarding and endlessly engaging as Spelunky 2. One that embraces all of the things that made the original so wonderful while also finding new and completely unexpected ways to improve upon the sense of exploration and discovery that’s so central to the experience. All of that is still true with Spelunky 2, but make no mistake, this is a true sequel that doesn’t rest on its laurels. Let me set the stage for this review by saying that Spelunky is one of my favorite video games of all time it’s the game that I point to as one of the best examples of emergent gameplay, risk vs reward design, and a model for the roguelike genre as a whole.
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