Giant cavemen, hidden castles and tricky liquids: how the Roguelike sequel pushed ever y idea to the limit
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Mossmouth, BlitWorks Publisher Mossmouth Origin US, Spain Release 2020
Five little words that can spell doom in Spelunky 2: “Your voice echoes in here…” The game never explains their precise meaning, but for longtime explorers it’s no great mystery. After enough trips through these procedurally generated dungeons, you begin to observe recurring shapes in their seemingly infinite variety of levels, which are after all constructed from a finite collection of building blocks – ‘rooms’, in the game’s parlance.
In most levels, these rooms are stacked four by four, for a total of 16. Should you be greeted at a level’s entrance with this phrase, however, that means you’re about to face one 36 rooms deep. You might well never see the outer boundaries of the level, which makes it that much more difficult to find the exit before the game’s three-minute timer runs out, summoning its ghost with a few more words of doom: “A terrible chill runs up your spine!”
Since Spelunky 2’s release in 2020, we’ve taken many hundreds of runs beneath the surface of its moon. A not-insubstantial portion of them have ended with this very scenario. Which might explain why it comes to mind so easily again now, as Spelunky creator Derek Yu talks us through how he approached designing this sequel – a process he describes, with a laugh, as “embiggening”.
“I had an overall philosophy of: let’s just try to get as close to the edges of the possibility space of this game as possible,” he tells us. “Whatever worked really well in Spelunky 1, let’s keep that – and then just add more.” In piling mechanics atop this delicate Heath Robinson construction, though, was there ever a fear of going too far? Of widening the boundaries far enough that Yu himself got lost? “For Spelunky 2 my feeling was, let’s not worry too much about that,” he says. “Spelunky 1 is this very nicely contained game. We weren’t going back and messing with that. We were just adding something new.”
Yu elaborates on what that process of ‘embiggening’ involved: “Sometimes it’s as simple as, ‘Oh, Spelunky 1 had a caveman, so let’s add a really big caveman’.” As trivial as that might make this addition sound, anyone who has met Quillback would surely disagree. This erinaceous miniboss waits for you at the bottom of World 1, launching himself at you like the terrible offspring of Sonic The Hedgehog and the rolling boulder from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, tearing apart any scenery he touches.
