There are two kinds of sequels you can make: you can try to completely reinvent the original game while preserving some element of it (how it makes players feel, the theming, etc), or you can just refine the original game. Spelunky 2 is the latter kind of sequel. Considering no one else even came close to the original in 12 years, that still makes it a pretty incredible game. Doubly so since the vast majority of changes they made make it a far better game. It also makes it weird to review because it's kind of just more Spelunky. So let's break down the changes instead.
1. Sublevels
One of the big new features is that every level is now two levels that you can go between by finding secret (or not so secret) doorways. Prior to release this was the feature I was worried about the most, since it seemed likely to bloat the game's pacing. Evidently so were the developers, as most of the randomized sublevels in the game are just empty passageways that occasionally hide treasure or can operate as shortcuts. While it does use these for incredible effect for some of the static discoveries, I'm not sure these add much to the game. They can also be really frustrating when you notice something hidden in them, but the entrances often have few reliable clues which makes them cost a lot of precious bombs early in a run.
2. Branching Paths
Spelunky is pretty heavily built on the concept of avoiding discrete modes. Getting to the hard ending of it still uses the same locations as the normal ending, it just puts different requirements on the player (and then rewards them by extending the game). In a game built around 30-60 minute permadeath runs, this makes expanding for a sequel without extending the length of a run tricky. They opted for having the game branch off into different biomes depending on where players decide to go. It's a slick solution to the problem, and early on I found myself making a lot of tough choices on where to go based on what equipment I had gained so far and whether I wanted "harder but more rewarding" or "faster but more prone to bad luck". That said, in the long term the game doesn't do a great job making every branch feel like a viable choice for a lot of esoteric late game reasons (on the other hand: I haven't looked much up, so maybe I'm full of crap and have just missed compelling reasons for each branch).
3. Level Design
This is the part where Spelunky 2 really blows the original out of the water. The most obvious example is just looking at a single piece of equipment: the jump boots. They let you jump a few tiles higher. In the original, they were occasionally useful. In the sequel, they are amazing. And that's because the level design is smart enough to have numerous patterns where important treasure is hanging out on a ledge that you can only get to by using a rope or an equipment upgrade like the jump boots. This thoughtful design extends to making ropes useful for more things than just backtracking as well, which then makes the resource management at the heart of Spelunky more compelling than the original.
I won't list every subtle difference (and there are a lot of them- not all of them positive, requiring bomb cooking for key items is a bit much), but the biggest one is how radically different the starting area is. Spelunky 1's was very much designed as a tutorial: most enemies died in 1 hit, and they had easy to predict trigger behavior (spider drops when you're under it). Spelunky 2 by contrast loads its starting area with three types of multi-hit enemies, demands that players understand that enemies use sight lines, and throws in more traps just in case you weren't dead enough. The end result is that the sequel is way harder (especially up front), but it also avoids having the most played area in the game also being the most boring. As a tutorial, it also imparts more lessons to the player than the original (ie, I learned things I never knew about 1 by playing 2 because they become vital techniques).
Needing the first area to be a tutorial, yet not boring to expert players having to replay it constantly is a pretty classic arcade game problem that I think about a lot. Making it harder for the sequel is probably the right choice, but it's also a problem that kind of turns me against the underlying design philosophy of avoiding modes and difficulty settings. Splitting the game into a newbie dungeon that unlocks the real dungeon would probably be a much better option (yeah I know don't write suggestions in a review, bite me).
It also feels weird to review this game right now because patches keep changing it radically. On release, the game would generate "dead end" parts of levels that, once entered, required using bombs or ropes to get out of (or just die if you don't have any). I found this pretty interesting, but as of right now they've been completely removed from the game. I don't exactly miss the dead ends, but it does make 2 feel more similar to 1.
4. Speed
You may recall me referring to the original as "a bit like a way too fast slippery janky freeware platformer". Apparently the developers had the same thought, so Spelunky 2 slows everything down ever just so slightly. It's really subtle, at first you only notice it with the drastically slowed down shopkeepers (who had comical "someone turned the entity speed to the max the engine allows" speed). But it actually applies to everything, and opens up new techniques like jumping over arrows. It's a huge improvement, and makes 2 feel like the professionally made version of the game.
5. More viable play styles
In the original, it was phenomenally boring to get the hard ending without stealing from shopkeepers (though plenty viable for the normal ending, which means this was likely intentional to force harder play styles). The sequel thankfully walks this back with small but important changes to make it a viable play style no matter what ending you're going for:
- There are fewer rooms that are just "all dirt blocks", meaning that getting money doesn't require using as many bombs- something that made buying early items very luck dependent in the original (it also means you spend a lot more time navigating levels, so it's just generally better across the board)
- There's a new fragile item that can consistently get you a big chunk of money in every level (it also enables even riskier money strategies for high score runs, but those aren't usually necessary for buying things now).
- Stealing in general has been heavily re-balanced such that it's riskier, but is also much deeper with different choices and strategies if you choose to do it.
The end result is that going for harder endings is no longer as suffocating about how you can play it. I cannot overstate how big of an improvement this is. It's one of my biggest pet peeves: games that create difficulty by removing options from the game. Sure you made it harder, but you also made it narrower. And those choices were what made playing it interesting to begin with. This is probably the biggest reason why I ended up playing Spelunky 2 for 2 months straight, while the original would get stale after a week or two.
6. Quests
The original game featured a sort of puzzle where the player needed to obtain certain items and do certain things in order to unlock the final world and see the true final ending: the hard ending chain. It's a really clever way of giving players a puzzle to chew on while trying to build up their skill and experience necessary to get the regular ending. Naturally, the sequel doubles down on this by changing up the chain itself (subverting and acknowledging the original's along the way), and the presence of multiple branches complicates it. On top of that, it adds little sub-chains involving NPC characters in the world (the simplest is rescuing all 3 NPCs in the jungle netting you rewards later in the run). The end result is that playing the early/mid game is a pretty overwhelming but rewarding experience of having a pile of puzzle pieces on a table and no idea what to do with them. I had an incredible time sharing new discoveries and theories with a couple friends as we cracked the case. We also sounded like lunatics. Even though most of it is just standard adventure game "take the thing to the place", putting it in the context of a roguelike platformer made it something special to figure out.Maybe more interesting is that the same design philosophy that allowed for multiple valid play styles, applies to the quest chain too. While 1 provided few opportunities to veer from the its chain, 2 allows alternative (but way harder) options for almost every step. Miss an item? Don't quit the game yet, there's still a razor thin chance that you can do something crazy to get there without it. It's mostly just there for stupid good players to exploit, but it also gives a certain degree of hope and late game discovery for normal players as well.
7. New Items
Most of them are pretty mediocre additions, actually. Their presence is nonetheless appreciated for more variety. The way numerous old items are made far better just by changing how you get them and the levels around them is maybe the bigger deal.
8. Continuity
Spelunky 2 stars the child of the original game's protagonist on a quest to find her missing parents. The world of the original game was a bunch of nonsense that the creator almost certainly pulled out of his butt as needed for the level/enemy design. So it's kind of incredible that 2 takes that hodgepodge and made me care about its lore just a tiny bit. Time has advanced since the original, characters have aged, different characters take up the role of old characters, etc. Even the enemies have evolved since the original game, getting new gadgets or moving to new areas because you ruined their life in the first game. You'll finally get to see some of the places those enemies came from. In short, it's loaded with completely unnecessary references to the original game. With so much time passed since the original, it all hits surprisingly hard if you're familiar.
I'm more Spelunky than man after sinking hundreds of hours into the game so I don't really appreciate this part of it anymore. But those first few dozen hours? This stuff was really cool.
9. The Town
It also introduces a sort of lobby area where all of the player characters you rescue show up and build little rooms to live in. There are some nice touches to it, like characters having different things to say depending on who you're playing as. But it falls completely short of matching something like Azure Dreams at creating a relaxing home to come back to between runs. Partially because only reaching new areas/endings unlocks things in it (rather than giving smaller goals like spending gold), partially because you get no choice in where or what to build in it, and partially because there's nothing to actually do in it since there's very little dialog variation.
I'm not that dissappointed with it, since it's really hard for a pure roguelike to pull off town building when the town cannot give anything back to the main game without breaking the purity (and the main game cannot create incentives to play it poorly for the sake of town rewards). At the same time, man it would have been pretty cool to buy a sweet couch with the money I earned from my previous runs? The fact that they did it poorly is almost worse than not doing it at all.
Conclusion
I still haven't tried the co-op mode (because the online is still disabled months after release). I still haven't beaten Spelunky 2. I got the normal ending, the hard ending, and I know how to enter the special ending. I'll probably never see the special ending, but I'll definitely enter it one of these days. I'm writing this review now because I'm going to forget my early thoughts if I wait any longer.
Should you play it? Yes, absolutely. Unless you hated the first one. In which case, the sequel will do nothing for you. Probably play the original first if you haven't because it's easier and the references are cool (it's also sufficiently different that 2 doesn't really replace it). If you didn't beat the original and don't want to, that's fine. The sequel is still a game worth playing even if you never beat it (quite literally since it features a true ending that is probably impossible for most people).
