In the month of September, two big roguelikes—games which reset when the player loses and randomizes the layout of levels for the next run—both released to widespread critical acclaim: Mossmouth’s Spelunky 2, the highly anticipated follow-up to Derek Yu’s 2012 opus—which itself was an HD remake of the Game Maker-developed 2008 original—and Supergiant Games’ Hades, the studio’s fourth game which had been available in early access for around two years until its recent 1.0 full release.
The 2013 PC port of Spelunky with the introduction of the Daily Challenge mode arguably helped kickstart the rise of Twitch, so it’s of little surprise to me that Spelunky 2’s release had been highly anticipated since its announcement in 2017. I’ve played over 400 hours of Spelunky HD myself and pretty much lost my mind when the surprise announcement trailer for the sequel first dropped. But it’s intrigued me to see how…little the game has seemed to move the needle within the public consciousness. It’s true that as of the time of this writing, the PC version of Spelunky 2 is still a few days away from releasing. But scrolling through my Twitter feed, and based on the length of time I’ve personally spent playing the game, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something else going on here which is repelling people from getting onboard with this long-anticipated sequel.
It’s no secret that more people than ever are playing games. Discussions on how accessible games are to people of all sorts seem to be spinning up more and more these days, and it’s long overdue. The Last of Us Part II, for all its numerous faults, had such an incredible amount of budget and time allocated to a dizzying amount of accessibility options that it felt like a real watershed moment for accessibility design in gaming. All this is to say that since more and more people are playing games, it stands to reason that more and more people might be looking to actually finish games. Statistics have shown that few people actually finish games for myriad reasons, whether it be time or interest. Difficulty in games is a subject which tends to go hand-in-hand with discussions of accessibility. When a game is hard to conquer, it naturally can extend the amount of time you spend trying to conquer it. And for certain types of players, the constant grind of again, again, just once more when pressed up against a particular pain point can sap any and all desire to try and see the rest of a game through.
By 2011, most developers and publishers had sort of all but gotten away from the punishing nature of games from the ‘retro’ era of gaming. Later that year, the original Dark Souls molted from the PS3-exclusive cocoon of Demon’s Souls and took the world by storm by being so notoriously difficult compared to much of what else was out there in the world that publisher Bandai Namco even decided to lean into it as a marketing gimmick. That same year, The Binding of Isaac, a procedural riff on The Legend of Zelda by Super Meat Boy developer Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, arrived as more or less the first big roguelite game, with the original Rogue Legacy and FTL: Faster Than Light arriving soon thereafter.
The creation of the roguelike subgenre ‘roguelite’ seems to me like it was sort of a concession to players who were perhaps put off by some of the more traditional ‘hardcore’ roguelikes a la Spelunky. What differentiates a ‘roguelite’ from what would traditionally be referred to as a ‘roguelike’ is that roguelites are roguelikes (yeah, I know) which offer players persistent avenues of progression between runs. So, for example, your first run of a roguelite might have you starting off with 100 health points, and then after five runs maybe you find an item which permanently increases this total to 150 health points for each and every run thereafter. Or maybe you start off with a cruddy little knife which only does five damage, but then later on you find a chest in the third world which gives you a sabre which does fifty damage.
Gamers tend to like it when they get more stuff. This is why it was always so interesting to me that the 2012 version of Spelunky was such a runaway success; in that game, the only persistent upgrade one is given is shortcuts to the different worlds. Every other upgrade afforded the player is purely internal; as you play more and more of Spelunky, you start to understand how its myriad enemies, items, and physics systems work independently as well as the numerous intriguing reactions which can stir up when entities acting within the game system push up against each other. It’s hard for me to tell exactly what made the game so popular, but if I had to warrant an albeit pretty wide-spanning guess, I’d say that its appeal in light of its lack of progression mechanics could be summed up by this series of confluences both intentionally designed and naturally reactive to those decisions: a really sharp difficulty curve throughout the arc of a run, the extremely brief time it takes to see through a successful run, the number of and intricacy of its intoxicating secrets, the slapstick comedic nature of its systemic interactions, and the community which naturally spawned out onto the internet as a result of the strength of the previous four pillars.
Almost two weeks into its release, I’ve played quite a bit of Spelunky 2 on PS4. But it’s really failed to draw me in in the way that Hades has, a game which I was extremely skeptical of upon its initial reveal and simultaneous early access release in 2018. On the one hand, I don’t envy Derek Yu and Blitworks having to follow up the original Spelunky (a term which I will hereafter use to refer to the 2012 Spelunky, not the actual original pixel art 2008 original, which, yes, I have also played a substantial amount of). It’s kind of staggering to think how summarily the original game knocked it out of the park in all regards. Consciously or not, the original game established each and every one of those initial core pillars. Each pillar serves as a ballast to the other pillars; in other words, no one pillar can stand on its own. For example, if the game were too difficult, a good run would take too long and could potentially bore the player. If the game were too long, a surprising or shocking death moment would feel tragic instead of comical. While the original game is hard to nail down in terms of its difficulty, if it were too hard and runs made too long it would make the breadcrumb trails left out in the open for some of its alluring mysteries feel completely unattainable and thus many players would feel far less inclined to try and pursue them. The list goes on.
Much has been made of Spelunky 2’s first area, the dwelling. Aesthetically speaking, it closely resembles the mines of the original game…mostly in that it’s not all that much to sneeze at. You’ve got your rocks, your stones, that kind of thing. But set a screenshot of it next to, say, the fourth world in Spelunky 2 (or, rather, the fourth world I’ve gotten to; the game has branching paths and, full disclosure, I haven’t finished a run yet, and we’ll get to why) and there’s simply no comparison. But in the first game, that was sort of okay. While you were certainly likely to die there just learning how the game fundamentally works, the novelty and quality of the procedurally-generated nature of the world, the introduction of the fun and often comedic physics engine, and the breadcrumbing of arcane items like the key, the chest, the Udjat Eye which you get when you open the chest, the sacrificial altar, and others were more than enough to intrigue a player and propel them through. It also was never too difficult of a world. You’re always given a good-sized variety of enemies and traps, and the quantity and distributions of these entities was always perfectly manageable once you get the hang of it.
Spelunky 2’s opening world is much, much harder than Spelunky 1’s. I mentioned before the first game having a really high-quality procedural-generation engine; I would say the second game’s hasn’t struck me as nearly as strong, and it’s often because the numerous additions stapled onto the game’s flow interrupt the stability of the aforementioned core pillars which made the original Spelunky tick. There are more enemy types in addition to the ones which existed in the mines of the first game and these new additions are way more annoying and difficult to deal with, particularly the spasmatic horned lizards and cave moles which often can trap you in an infinite loop of damage, ultimately ensuring your death. The first game was far more consistent about ensuring that you would be given a path from the start to the exit without forcing the usage of bombs and ropes, which if depleted essentially ensure your need to start over; here, you’re much more likely to be led to your demise by a passageway laid out for your by the procedural generation engine. Rooms are larger and so naturally will exponentially increase the length of a run. The music isn’t nearly as strong as the two tracks that could play in the first area of the first Spelunky; this new track just doesn’t buzz with that same sort of refreshing energy to really start you off on the right foot. Putting the treasure chest into a backroom—a new addition to Spelunky 2 which consistently disappoint in terms of room layout and the quality of surprises and loot contained within—while not allowing the player to take the chest out of the back room means that the player has to take the key to the chest room. The previous game allowed you to bring the chest to the key, so if the chest spawned above the key, and since the player always starts at the top of a room and needs to head downward toward the exit, it made this aspect of traversing through a room in the beginning of a Spelunky run feel a lot more dynamic. In Spelunky 2, keys can spawn below chests, so since you need to take keys to chests in this game, it essentially means that in this scenario you’ll be forced to spend bombs and ropes to bring the key to the chest so as to get an item that you’ll be far less likely to even use properly seeing as you’ve had to expend resources to get it, even before taking into account the general difficulty increase which permeates Spelunky 2.
The most bizarre change to Spelunky 2’s opening area is the fact that area 1-4 is always exactly the same. You’ll consistently face off with the quillback porcupine man who you need to goad into rolling through the rock wall (or instead just bomb through the side or the bottom) in order to reach either the left or right back rooms. This miniboss is never spiced up from run to run by, say, the addition of an enemy type bolstering up the encounter, or a trap or two, though if you’re lucky you might find an item box or damsel in the top corners of the room. As such, this encounter always plays out exactly the same and so is easy to quickly master, especially if you’re adequately experienced with the first game, causing this area to quickly grate. Repetitive level layouts are the bane of the roguelike’s existence, so it’s strange to me that this idea wasn’t quickly shooed away before it could serve to muck up the flow of Spelunky 2’s initial impression upon the player.
It’s been eight years since Spelunky HD released. So much has changed about how games are designed and how they’re played, and I’m generally not someone who tends to wax poetic about the way things used to be. Far from it, in fact. If I were to list out some of my favorite games of the last handful of years, a consistent theme threading that list together would be that each game gave me an experience I’d never had before. Even having played some of the original version of Spelunky before its 2012 HD re-release, that new version absolutely still managed to instantly come across to me as a breath of fresh air through its aesthetic redesign (both in terms of the spritework and the approach to music) and through the addition of a ton of new secrets. But that was then.
Roguelikes, too, have changed. As game development becomes more and more accessible, the cost-effective nature of procedural generation has clearly become an attractive prospect for numerous game developers, seeing as a new roguelike/roguelite/whatever seems to release on Steam every five minutes these days. Unsurprisingly, many of these games aren’t very good. Others are, in fact, very good! Whichever the case, as there are thousands of games coming out every day, many of these roguelikes tend to fail to capture an audience. It’s hard to stand out amongst the crowd.
When I first saw footage of Spelunky 2, the thought that struck my mind was, “Wow, that sure looks a whole lot like Spelunky!” When reviews for the game came out the day before the release of its PS4 version, some version of that initial thought proliferated each of the generally positive reactions to the game, so much so that it’s hard not to view this reaction as a general consensus about the game. It’s Spelunky, but a lot harder, and that hasn’t moved me to want to play too much of it all at once as I previously thought I’d be doing every waking minute following its release into the world. The changes to the formula and increase in difficulty brush up against the very foundations of those core pillars. Getting through the initial area has proven to be a consistent chore for me due to its far more punitive difficulty curve and weaker level generation engine, often robbing the play experience of comedic potency. Acknowledging that a successful run through this first area will consistently take me longer than it did in the first game makes me want to play the game in general less and less.
Moreover, to release a Spelunky 2 in 2020, as a veteran player of Spelunky, needs to mean something different to even attempt to recapture that same spirit of unease, of descending into the unknown. This is maybe the only time this sentence will ever be said by anyone ever, but when I think back to that era of games, particularly to independent games such as those being released onto the Xbox Live Arcade platform…to be frank, the spectre of the cancelled Fez II hangs over Spelunky 2 for me. Developer Phil Fish purported Fez II would be so profound a change from its predecessor that it would resemble the jump from the first Legend of Zelda (a top-down action game) to Zelda 2: Adventure of Link (a bizarre side-scrolling anomaly in the Zelda franchise which I love deeply). For a developer so obsessed with toss-ups and creating new experiences (his long-awaited side project UFO 50, a collection of fifty full NES-style games, seems more to fit the bill here), it’s honestly sort of beguiling to me that Spelunky 2 hews so closely to its predecessor.
It might sound kind of ludicrous to bring it up, but I do think it cogent to mention the story of Spelunky 2. What’s on display here is more or less an excuse to put you into very Spelunky-esque scenarios; now, you’re on the moon, which for some reason in the Spelunky world has mines and jungles and hidden Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian iconography tucked beneath its spherical façade. You play as the daughter of the Spelunky dude from the first game, who was left behind on earth with her dog while her parents were so obsessed with reliving their glory days that they, well, left behind their daughter to fend for herself. She reasonably wonders what was so enthralling that her parents thought it worth leaving her behind for, and so she makes her way to the moon to find them after they fail to return within a reasonable amount of time. Then you just play Spelunky 2 a bunch until maybe you win.
And I never really liked any roguelites, which is where these types of games seem to be trending, which is maybe why I hinging so many of my hopes on it being a game which really provoked me and gave me something I’d never experienced before. The insistence of roguelite games on including persistent progression mechanics always kind of felt like cheating to me, as if the game designers were trying to paper over core design issues with flashy character, ability, and weapon upgrades. Instead of emphasizing to the player the need for players to fully understand and master the core game systems to make progress, these games are content with allowing the player to simply invest raw time and energy so that eventually they’ll power through toward ensuring successful runs.
If I were to try and pin down what’s most changed about my taste in games since the original Spelunky released, a game which as made fairly clear here was such a watershed moment in how I think about games, it would be that great character writing, thoughtful world design, and a compelling story can often pull me through what might otherwise be sort of a humdrum experience, gameplay-wise. It’s why I thought it worthwhile to mention Spelunky 2’s flimsy story hook at all. Had the game contained anything resembling a worthwhile narrative layer stringing the player along from run to run, I could actually see myself sticking with it for a lot longer than I currently do. Instead, in very Nintendo fashion, the characters here are little more than gameplay information dispensers. You can save characters from the mines and bring them back to your home base camp, but I’m sort of confused why this feature was included as nobody seems to do or say anything of interest.
Enter Hades. Supergiant’s latest is undeniably blowing up online, becoming the center of a ton of fan art, character shipping, and armchair game design analysis (unlike what I’m doing). The game legitimately feels like a phenomenon here in this moment, which was so unexpected to me given how long it had been allowed to gestate in the public eye through both its availability on early access and its semi-transparent development cycle by way of Noclip’s Hades behind-the-scenes development series. Its depictions of well-trodden characters of Greek mythos wallowing in stasis about the Underworld are decidedly modern, each of them waxing semi-poetically (but not too poetically) about their often troublesome relationships with parents, ex-lovers, and sordid past lives above ground amongst the Olympians. But the game’s not so modern that it falls into the trap many other games do of feeling like they’re backseat written by eras of internet culture which by the point the game finally makes it out of the door are already outmoded.
And the game is a roguelite, and I really like it! And I’m honestly really surprised that I really like it. Since the runaway success of Supergiant’s debut in Bastion, many have clamored for either a direct sequel or at the very least some sort of follow-up within that universe. Instead, Supergiant bounced back with Transistor (which puzzled many Bastion fans with its sort of actiony, sort of RTS-adjacent combat; a game I strongly disliked) and Pyre (sort of a hybrid of Oregon Trail and NBA Jam which I adore but I always suspected didn’t connect with many as evidenced by its lack of a Switch release and also having come out in 2017, one of the busiest years in gaming ever). I don’t have the numbers in front of me, so I can only speculate, but I’ve always suspected these games were maybe not the hits Supergiant were hoping for. As such, my initial, admittedly overly cynical response to seeing Hades was that it seemed like Supergiant had basically snuck out a Bastion sequel by incorporating and refining that game’s combat mechanics and mixing that in with a trendy roguelite structure which lots of people would be likely to glom onto. I was always a little suspicious of people who liked it during that early access period. From what I could tell, they seemed to like it simply for being a tightly-refined version of a game I’ve already played numerous versions of before, just covered in different coats of paint. As games like that tend to not be much to my liking, even though I overall liked Supergiant, to be completely honest I’d more or less completely written the game off in my head as not for me.
What I didn’t expect was the ways in which Supergiant would use the game’s roguelite (note the ‘t’) structure to tell what is ultimately a series of compelling linear stories, and it’s here where the magic happens. Hades works from the word go because its isometric character action-style gameplay is immediately snappy and engaging, and you, as the player-character Zagreus, son of Hades, are given just enough narrative meat to sink into that you’re able to tell that there’s something going on beneath the surface, so to speak. At the outset of your very first run, you start not in the game’s hub zone but at the beginning of the game’s first area, Tartarus. Though you could theoretically make it to the end and win on your very first run (which I suspect will if it hasn’t already become the theme of many a YouTube Hades challenge video in the future), it’s far more likely you’ll perish to one of the Underworld’s many Shades. Upon death—Hades’ idea of failure—you’re sent back home to the domain of your abusive parent, that eponymous Temple of Hades (a particularly prescient concept for millennials and Gen Z’rs, who I imagine might make up a large portion of the amount of people playing Hades). You’re then left to sort of muck about the place with your fellow malcontents who are all just sort of going nowhere forever while your distant, gruff father figure scribbles who-knows-what into ledgers and Scythian tomes.
I knew early on that I thought Hades was really fun and that it carried with it the usual staples of Supergiant’s oeurvre (killer aesthetic, great music, strong voice acting direction, etc.). But it was still a roguelite, and I just didn’t like roguelites in the same way that I liked the more traditional structure of Spelunky a lot more. I figured my time with the game would end much as did my time with 2018’s Dead Cells, which at first I enjoyed mostly for its snappy controls but quickly got away from as the snarky presentational tone started to grate and the artifice of the gameplay loop became too transparent for me to bear.
Sisi Jiang said something on Twitter which crystalized a jumping-off point for me on why Hades works so well: “i really hope that more indies emulate the hades model of "polish a core gameplay really well and extend the playtime with narrative instead of fetch quests"”. To try and expound upon this: while it’s true that Hades employs the roguelite model making a really enjoyable combat loop which then emphasizes upgrades and unlockables to give the player the sensation of getting better at the game over time, that’s the point. Hades has narrative in spades, and it’s able to do this by narratively functioning much as a linear game would, temporally speaking. Yes, as you play, you accrue more upgrades for your person, but you’re also delivered more and more dialogue exchanges in often surprising ways with characters who are fully fleshed out and thereby made interesting, in addition to informative flavor text which helps ground the player within the sprawling and sometimes confusingly labyrinthine nature of Greek mythology.
Characters you meet out during a run will appear in the Temple of Hades, ready to remark to the player something about their current state. Or maybe they’ll comment on some particular aspect of the player’s previous run in a way which feels like the game is truly listening to you and your playstyle, such as what weapon you brought out on the previous run or whether you frequently chose upgrades from a particular god such as Zeus or Aphrodite. Or maybe they’ll remember that you died to them on the previous run, or maybe instead that you bested them last time, so this time you oughta steel yourself for what’s in store for you! Whereas Spelunky felt alive to me in 2012 because of its intensely physical and granular systemic interactions between acting entities in the gamespace, Hades manages to feel alive because of the sprawling nature of the ways in which it manages to sink its narrative tendrils within the player’s entrails.
One of Hades’ big secrets is that a single successful run is not the end of Hades; in a stroke of genius, it wants you to finish a run so it can get on with the story that happens after your first victory. I’ve heard plenty of talk of a ‘true ending’, the means of reaching this point of which I’m not yet privy to. I haven’t really finished either of these games, despite having a full successful Hades run under my belt, which is to say that I’ve yet to roll credits on the game.
But I know that I’m far more likely to find myself motivated to want to finish Hades than I am Spelunky 2. To finally wrap back around to my earlier discussion about accessibility in games, Hades, despite being pretty low on actual accessibility options, is at the very least far more approachable. Through its fun and well-drawn characters and world, it’s rendered far less cold and calculated than Spelunky 2. Both games are difficult, but when you die in Hades, you don’t tend to feel like your cause of death appeared out of thin air. And unlike in Spelunky 2, that death will be remembered as meaningful, reverberating out to affect the game’s cast in ways both surprising and appropriate. They don’t just lead to menus to be mashed through to get back into the action, and it’s that approach to death and loss which is really connecting with me.
And sure, maybe it’s kind of silly to try and compare them. After all, in a lot of ways, Hades and Spelunky 2 couldn’t be more different. But they came out around the same time. I’m a human. I’m subjective, and I feel stuff. This cosmic coincidence means no matter waht, I can’t not situate these two games side by side in a constant dual for my unwavering affection. As much as developer Derek Yu has in the past espoused his love for surprises and mysteries, particularly in the book about the original game which he himself wrote, to me Spelunky 2 feels too much like its predecessor regardless of any new items and enemy types that it just doesn’t provoke me anymore. It’s a game which is in some ways is reactive to how people engaged with the first game yet which still leaves me feeling like I’m running in place on a patch of ground marked ‘2012’ when I play it. That first game came out eight years ago! Or twelve years if you’re feeling like a pedant.
And I’m getting older! I’m twenty-six years old now. I need new experiences to thrive. We already do so much of the same old stuff over and over and over again in our daily lives, that when a new experience does come around it can truly feel special and like something worth treasuring. In a year for games which has pretty consistently disappointed me, Hades miraculously keeps on doing that magical surprise thing even as it sends me to perform my Sisyphean task (see what I did there?) once more topside. And look, yeah, I paid the twenty bucks asking price for both of these games. I’m me; I’m going to keep playing both of them to try and find what’s waiting for me on the other side. But it’s been a hard, lonely year. So now, eight years later, I don’t want to do it all again by myself. This time, I’ll drag a friend or two along through Hell and back, even if it kills us.