TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Comparing Notes In Spelunky’s Unique Daily Adventures

Spelunky is out on PC again! The fancy version this time, and with a new feature that is obsessing me more than ever before. Every day, there’s one set of randomly generated levels that’s the same for every Spelunky player. Everyone gets one try at it, and when they die, that’s it, they can never play it again.

The scores for each person’s attempt are ranked, of course, but I don’t really care about that. The reason it’s so fascinating to me is that it takes a generative game – one that’s different every time – and gives it one of the most appealing things about pre-scripted games: being able to compare notes with your friends.

And these days, we can do more than compare notes – we can record our playthroughs and share them on YouTube. Eurogamer editor Tom Bramwell is doing this every day, and I plan to whenever I have time. Here are both our attempts at today’s daily, mine first. It’s quite fun to compare your own try with someone else’s level by level – I switched between these to see how we handled each differently.

Dailies feel different to play, too. There’s the tension of only having one shot at a playthrough that is somehow important, then in our case there’s the pressure of knowing you’ll be putting this up for all to see, and then there’s the really nice sense of community in knowing that everyone’s going to be facing the same obstacles and treasures.

Yesterday’s daily had a dark level at the end of the mines, one of the worst things that can happen in the mines. But right at the entrance was a shop, and the shop was selling a jetpack, the best item in the game. It was great realising I happened to have the cash on hand to buy it, and wondering who else might have got here a few thousand short. And of those who could afford it, how would they get on with total mobility in a near-blind environment?

I made it through slowly but safely, then threw myself into a pitcher plant in the jungle.

In the videos above, one of the jungle levels is full of the living dead, and I had a tricky but fun fight with a vampire that won me his cape but cost me two bombs. Tom Bramwell reaches the same fight from a different side of the level, and because of that he has a shotgun when he does. So his fight is rather shorter.

So, I love dailies, and I think the feature is genius – both as a genuinely valuable thing for players, and as a neat marketing tool for the game. I’m expecting this Steam release to completely crush the Xbox one in sales, despite being so much later, just because it encourages word-spreading so nicely.

The one thing I don’t like is the scoring. This is the one game where I care enough that I could get competitive about it among my friends, but the rankings are meaningless at the moment. They’re just how much money you had when you died – a value which oscillates drastically depending on the placement of shops and stuff.

If I engage with the scoring system, then once I’ve gathered loads of treasure and find an awesome shop full of the most exciting items in the game, the smart move is to just kill myself on some spikes and stop playing – ending with a vast sum of money. The tools I could buy do aid survival, which in turn could lead to more profits, but giving the extreme unpredictability of Spelunky, numerically speaking it’s not worth the risk.

But that’s a terrible way to play, and I refuse to do it. So my run today, which was pretty good, got me a pathetic score. My run yesterday, which was worse, got me a huge score and I placed 112th in the world – just because I died shortly before getting to a shop.

A simple tweak would fix this: rank everyone by progress, then by score. So if you got to a further level than me, you’re higher in the charts. But if we got to the same level, then the richer player ranks higher. That way it would sync up with the most enjoyable way to play, which is prioritising further adventuring over wealth-on-death.

Update

I’ll just add these here as I do them. This is a short one, with commentary, like “It was a terrible terrible mistake! It was a terrible mistake!”

Things I should have done differently:

– Could have sacrificed the idol instead of selling it, for a jewel-excreting monkey that would have made me more money as I scoured the level for ages.

– Should have bought the Mattock first, and used it to both mine gems and build stairways to let me get back up without ropes. Didn’t know I’d get the Udjat Eye though.

– Best way to kill that spider would have been to drop the other side of it, crouch and roll a bomb into its web. I did see the bat that damaged me ahead of time, but forgot that it would also knock me back, which of course saved and activated the spider.

– Could have also Mattocked through the wall above and avoided the spider, but its jewels and sticky jar were worth going after.

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