TOM FRANCIS
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To Hell And Back In Spelunky

Last night I accomplished probably the hardest thing I’ve ever managed in a video game: going to hell and back in Spelunky. It only took 41 minutes, but it took me hundreds of hours of play – and about 3,000 deaths – to learn how to do those 41 minutes. Here’s the run:

To complete Spelunky, you just have to survive 15 randomly generated levels and then trick the final boss into killing itself. To get to hell, though, you have to perform a series of specific rituals in a specific order, using unique objects that crop up in different places each time, and then defeat the boss in a particularly audacious way to use his death as a stepping stone to the underworld.

• Somewhere in the mines there’ll be a Golden Key. Somewhere else in the mines there’s a Golden Chest. You have to pick one up and bring it to the other to unlock the chest and obtain the Udjat Eye.
• Somewhere in the jungle, there’s a door buried behind solid rock. The only way to know which bit of solid rock is by getting close enough to it for the Udjat Eye to blink, faster the closer you are. If you find it, and if you have enough explosives to blow it open, you reach The Black Market.
• The Black Market is full of shops selling a random selection of equipment, but in the very back, there’s a shop that sells something you can’t find anywhere else: The Ankh of Resurrection. It costs more than any other item in the game, an amount of money it’s hard to acquire this early, and all it does is give you one extra life. And if you want to get to Hell, you can’t use it.
• Until, somewhere in the ice caverns, you find the Moai Head. It’s an impenetrable stone statue, but the next item you need is inside it: the Hedjet. The Moai Head is inscribed with the symbol of the Ankh, a hint at the horrible secret: the only way in is to kill yourself. The Ankh resurrects you inside, but is lost forever.
• Beneath the ice caverns you’ll find the temple, and somewhere on the first level of the temple you’ll find Anubis, a flying god with a heat-seeking psionic death staff whose projectiles can pass through walls. Kill him. Take the Staff.
• Somewhere on the next level of the temple will be a Golden Door. Combining the Hedjet with the Staff creates the key, the key opens the door, and the door leads you to the City of Gold.
• The City of Gold used to be the secret, one of the most elaborate in gaming. I wrote a whole feature about it. But in this version of Spelunky, it’s just another step in the path to Hell. Somewhere in its solid gold walls is the Book of the Dead. Take it and Anubis II, the undead version of the god you just killed, will rise. He can fly through walls and summon infinite skeletons and follow you between levels.
• Kill Anubis II, make it to Olmec, the boss of the regular game, and the Book of the Dead will start… chomping. Find the place it chomps fastest. Find a way to make Olmec stomp there, until he sinks into the lava. Stand on Olmec’s head as he sinks, and walk through the Door to Hell just above the lava’s surface.

And that gets you to level 1. Of Hell, the most dangerous world of one of the most danger-obsessed games around. Hell isn’t just a secret level, it’s a secret world, as big as any of the main ones. And at the end is an even bigger boss. Only by completing it and defeating him do you actually escape, and that’s what I did for the first time last night.

The interesting thing about this insane process is that I never read a guide to it. I heard about each bit of the puzzle by word of mouth, a stray screenshot, an accidentally read spoiler, or a Let’s Play that revealed more than I thought it would.

It’s a weird modern equivalent of folklore, an elaborate story about secrets and artifacts that’s passed from person to person by excitement. And those of us who pursue it have memorised every illogical step of the improbable tale. Some of it we’ve tried for ourselves, some of it many times. But until you make it all the way through, part of it is still legend, and that’s tantalising.

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