Spelunky

“Surprisingly, the search did not yield any results,” I read after I typed the word Spelunky in the “Site Search” column. It's really amazing, because I was sure that I got acquainted with this game thanks to Habr. Now, perhaps, I will think that the link to the game dreamed me in a good dream. Search will not lie, I hope, so I still write this post.

Moreover, there is a good reason: in early September, the first version of the game finally came out (before that, it means that versions were released with the number <1).

I propose to start downloading the game right now. It weighs only 11 megabytes. You still have to download it after you read the post, so you can do it right away. (I draw your attention to the fact that at the moment the game is written only for Windows . I hope someday both Linux users, Mac users, and even characters of the book “The Difference Engine” will be able to play this game without any special problems and emulators)
')
So, Spelunky . I suspect that the name of the game comes from the word “spelunk”, which in translation means “explore caves, go in for speleology”. This is what we have to do: we will turn into a small pixel man, change clothes into a pixel costume (which will allow local princesses to confuse us with Indiana Jones at the meeting), take pixel ropes, bombs and a whip and go down to the pixel cave. It was not by chance that I repeated the pixel adjective so many times - graphics became one of the first reasons why I fell in love with this game.

Speaking of love and princesses, the main goal of the game is not to save the princess (there will be several of them here), but to get to the farthest corner of the cave and find there ... I won’t spoil your pleasure, I’d better give you an extra reason to play a game.

In the dungeons you can meet not only princesses and enemies, but also ... baleen sellers. You can find them in the shops, where they, if desired, will exchange gold for bombs, ropes, weapons or other useful things.

While the eyes are enjoying the scenery, and hands are the gameplay, three words are spinning in the mind: “randomly generated levels”. Yes, in Spelunky , as in Nethack, the levels were different every time! This allows the game not to bother for VERY long. It will force you to train your will power - it is not so easy to break away from the game. I just can’t understand why the miraculous idea of ​​generating such levels is still not used by large game developers. Or have I not been following major developers for a long time? The randomness of the levels has a great effect on the complexity of the game: you will not be bored playing. Every time you will, willy-nilly, you will have to face small puzzles or fall into the traps, which are visible from afar, but at the same time rather insidious.

Wonderful design, thoughtful gameplay and the spirit of the old school give the game such luxurious charm, which would be more than enough for a dozen of modern large-scale game projects.

By the way. If for some reason you get tired of playing Spelunky on one terrible day, you can try to stretch the fun against it and use the built-in level editor, or the levels that other players have done.



The game developer is a man named Derek Yu , a graduate of the University of Berkeley, the administrator of the TIGSource resource that is popular among indie games fans , and the author of several other wonderful games (I'm OK, Quibble Race, Diabolika II, Mean Cuisine, Eternal Daughter).

Along with the release of the first version of the game, he launched a web site where you can download the latest version and where you can soon get a version of the game on the X-Box and some other bonuses.

That's not all. In the game, all sorts of secrets are hidden (in the levels themselves) and several mini-games (in the rating room that we see after death). I will not spoil your pleasure by telling about what is hidden there and how to get there. I’ll just give you a link to the Spelunky Encyclopedia , where you can find out everything you need.

Finally, I remind the link:

Download Spelunky v 1.0

Good luck!