Welcome aboard! Mind the puddles - looks like there’s a leak somewhere. Today, Chris is back on Spelunky 2. How does Kali feel about that? Let’s see.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

D.O.T Defence is one of those lovely games that’s always winking at me from my Steam list. It’s a fast-paced blend of RTS and auto-battler, and while it’s nothing like Advance Wars, I can’t imagine that, if you love Advance Wars, you won’t enjoy this. CD

This week I was at the DiGRA games conference, and I got to take a peek at Candy Trail by screamsfromthekitchen, a storytelling game for two players in which they co-construct a path through a garden. They make incredibly cool analogue games so I encourage you to check them out! FSN

Interesting things

If you watched Backrooms and want more weird fiction with a certain colour association, I would recommend The King in Yellow, first published in 1895. It’s a novel about a novel that seems to drive anyone who reads it to obsessive terror. Here’s a character describing the fictional book, in a way that reminds of a certain video game franchise:

“This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.” FSN

Essay: Long Fall

It’s always a delight to find a new game lurking inside an old one, and that’s doubly true when the old game is as good as Spelunky 2.

I’ve returned to Spelunky 2 on the Switch 2 over the last week or so. The levels look beautiful on that huge screen, and it’s the perfect game to drop in and out of between other, less important, things. I’ve just unlocked the fast travel to world 5-1, which is one of the game’s most puzzling environments. It’s the ice level, but instead of getting four floors of it, Spelunky 2 gives you a single floor with a massive gap in the middle.

The straightforward way to get through all this is to travel down as far as you can go from the top, and then head through a door just above the big gap, and into a frozen environment filled with yetis. You work your way down through that and then head back out into the main part of 5-1, having moved past that deadly gap in the process.

That’s what you’re meant to do anyway. But over the last week, emboldened by a mistake in which I screwed things up in a promising way, I now approach things very differently.

Essentially, if you just fling yourself into the abyss as soon as you can, 5-1 becomes something very similar to a Trials bonus stage, or Crash Mode in Burnout. 

Here are the rules as I have established them: your job is to fall through the level and ideally hit the Kali altar in the bottom section of 5-1, at which point you will be sacrificed. Nice work! This is extremely challenging, in part because you cannot see where you’re falling, and partly because there may not be a Kali altar down there in the first place.

But sometimes, there is! And sometimes I very nearly hit it. And so the fun continues.

This works so well because you bounce when you’re dead, which, alongside jump pads, yetis to bound off, and explosive mines, means that you’re always in for some sort of nasty treat no matter where you land. It reminds me a little of an old marble run table my stepmother used to own. The score isn’t important with these kinds of thing, it’s all about what happens to the marble on the way down.

I have, incidentally, discovered some useful things playing 5-1 like this. Well, one useful thing. If you find yourself falling through the gap in the middle of 5-1, steer left or right as far as you can. I’ve found that if you do this the odds of connecting with the side of a ledge, which allows you to stop falling without losing any hearts, is greatly improved.

All good. But mainly, I’m a fan of finding new games inside old ones. And, as ever, Spelunky never disappoints. CD