Spelunker is a 1983 classic arcade game about, basically, the weakest hero ever, travelling through a dangerous cave to find treasure. The game came out on various systems (Commodore 64, NES, MSX in addition to arcades) and it was fairly popular. There was a sequel, which doesn’t seem as well known as the first, and, from what I’ve seen, is very different. Afterwards, the series has fallen into obscurity (with nothing coming between 1987 and 2009 in Japan). The only recent game that seemed to have anything to do with Spelunker was the indie game Spelunky, which is very different gameplay-wise from what I’ve seen, but clearly inspired by it.

After over 20 years in obscurity, Spelunker is finally back and ready to kick ass… sort of, considering kicking an ass would probably kill him.

Read on!

Developer: Irem
Publisher: Tozai Games
Date of Release: November 23rd 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3(on PSN)

Genre: Side-Scrolling Platformer
Rated E for Everyone

Note: We received a free copy of this game for review. This does not, however, affect our review. We’ll judge the game as it is, no matter if we got a review copy or not.

What is good about this game

Presentation
It’s definitely not great, but Spelunker looks fairly good. What I like is that there’s 2 graphic styles to choose from. A modernized 3D graphic HD style, which looks nice. There’s a lot of details in the textures and background and the graphic style is very fun and cartoony. The other style is the “Classic” look, which is actually the 8-bit NES graphics, just smoothed out to not look like crap on an HDTV. Playing an NES on an HDTV isn’t terrible, but there are random white pixels strewn around the screen and it’s not perfect. This, on the other hand, looks fantastic. I actually find that the “Classic” look is the superior one. Not because it actually looks better, since it’s nowhere near as detailed as the Remake graphics, but because it’s a lot simpler. Looking at the “Classic” graphics, it’s a lot easier to see what can kill you, what can kill you is easier to see, there’s nothing in the background so you can’t be mixed up by anything there, and it’s easier to do precise pixel-perfect jumps and such.

On the music side, both graphical styles have different sounds and music. The Remake look has remixed versions of the classic Spelunker tunes and sounds, and the Classic look has the actual classic tunes and sounds. You can basically go with the graphic/sound style that fits your taste, and I think that’s awesome.

Gameplay
The gameplay in Spelunker is a lot more like a puzzle game than a platformer. Rather than fast twitch reflexes and fast movement, here, it’s about figuring out patterns and solving minor puzzles and figuring your way out of mazes.

The game is simple: you have to find keys to open doors that block your way to the end of the level, and get to the next level, while finding treasure and killing ghosts and blowing up rocks and walls. The gimmick? Well, your character is incredibly weak. Touching something a little bit hot kills you, falling half your height kills you, touching animals kills you, touching ghosts kills you, touching dying ghosts kills you, touching water kills you, touching fire kills you, getting shit on by bats kills you. And, unless you pick up air power-ups, you can die from air loss…. Your character dies easily, and has very short jump distance. He’s stupidly weak, and I think that, strangely, this is one of the strengths of the game. Rather than rushing your way through the game jumping on/shooting enemies, you have to take it slowly and think your way through the game, and also be pixel perfect at times. Since everything kills you, you have to be more careful. You have to use the short jump properly to jump over holes or obstacles, travel on moving platforms or mine carts, and various other things. It’s a very difficult game, but a very pattern-based game.

You do have means to defend yourself. Pressing Up and Square uses a flare, which makes bats disappear so they won’t shit on you (no, really)… just be careful, touching the flare kills you. Pressing Down and Square drops a bomb in front of you which can blow up rocks that block your path, certain walls where you can find secret objects, and it kills certain enemies… Oh, and of course being too close to the blast kills you as well. Finally, at random, ghosts will appear and try to kill you. By pressing Square alone, you use some sort of ghost busting gun, which will either make blue ghosts split into multiple small ghosts, or big purply ghosts shrink, and it will slowly kill smaller ghosts. Just be careful. As the ghosts dissolve, they still kill you if they’re not fully dead.

Content/Leaderboards
There’s actually a fair amount of content. You have a Solo mode, where you play through a hundred stages, separated in 10 areas. You have a co-op mode, which can be played online or offline (both play in split-screen so you can see where the other players are), which also has 100 levels split in 10 areas (oh, there’s a race mode as well). Through each stage, there’s walls that you can bomb to find crystals and mural fragments which you can try to collect to get a trophy. Those are hard to get because each of the 100 levels in both Single and Multi-player has one of those mural pieces. Also, the game features Leaderboards, where you can be ranked by Score, Depth in the cave and various other little statistics. There’s a good amount of content here if you get into it. Oh, and there’s a platinum trophy in this game, which is rather rare for downloadable titles.

What some people might not like

Slow Gameplay
The gameplay is REALLY slow. There’s some games where I’ll hold it against them for being slow-paced, but in this case I don’t find it to be such a bad thing because the game design takes the slow gameplay and really makes it work. It plays like a platformer, but it’s a bit more of a puzzler. But the slow pace will definitely irk certain players. Everything moves really slowly, the jumps are short so you basically have to platform in a certain way and everything else will kill you. And there’s a fairly big lack of checkpoints (one per 10 stages), so the slow pace slows down the experience even more as you get game overs and have to restart the game from the beginning (or at the start of an area).

Difficulty
If you don’t control the game perfectly, you die. I really like that. Some people will get really annoyed by that, which is very understandable, since you restart the game/area when you die. And this is one very picky game. Pixel perfect barely manages to explain how good you have to be at certain parts. One thing that does slightly make the game easier is the Classic graphics, since it’s easier that way to gauge jump distances and pixels and such. But some people will find the difficulty of Spelunker overwhelming.

Overall

I’m very happy to be playing this. I’ve wanted Spelunker on the NES for a while, and the one time I managed to buy a copy, it didn’t work (even after opening the cartridge and deep cleaning it). So playing such a polished version is really nice. It’s definitely not for everyone though, and I’d say that the appeal is really limited to the more hardcore/difficulty-loving gamers. But, if you think you are part of that relatively small demographic, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to enjoy it.

It’s a really good arcade-style game, it’s challenging, you can choose graphic styles which is awesome, and there’s tons to do. Worth checking out.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Very nice presentation that can adapt to your tastes
- Fun, precise puzzle/platforming gameplay
- Challenging
- Lots to do
- Multiplayer

Cons
- REALLY hard
- Some people might find the slow gameplay boring
- Online community isn’t huge (though it’s not too hard to find other players)

The Save Factor

The game costs 10$ on the PSN, and I feel that there’s enough content to warrant the high price.

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