As I get older, my favourite kind of game is probably the inscrutable platformer you used to get on home computers back when I was a kid in the 1980s. Jet Set Willy. Gumshoe. Booty. The settings were often reduced to a spectral gantry propped against a plain black backdrop, the themes were obscure and presumably highly personal, and death was frequently cheap. But these games transported me further beyond the screen than any have since. Their mystery is palpable. They are magic.
And now I’m playing Spelunker HD Deluxe on the Switch. It’s a game with DNA from that era, updated in certain aspects, wonderfully, maddeningly antique in others. And to me, at least, it’s magic, too. It’s fussy and weird and you can die by walking off a ladder the wrong way; it is emphatically not the game you would recommend to just anybody. But I think I love it.
I’ve wanted to play Spelunker for years, because I love Spelunky so much. Both are games about descending into the darkness of caves. Both are games that involve ropes and bombs and pursuing ghosts. But Spelunky, as you probably know, is a perfect clockwork thing in which every consequence to every action can be learned and understood and – theoretically – foreseen in future runs. It’s a glitchless wonder, in which you do not die from walking off a ladder the wrong way. Spelunker is much older and much odder. But you can see the bright flicker of brilliance within it. I believe that.
Spelunker was created in 1983 by Tim Martin, Robert Barber and Cash Foley, and made its way across home computers and even to the NES and MSX. To have encountered it back then! To have hunched over the keyboard, to have kept a pad and pen to map its unchanging spaces. In Spelunker, you explore treacherous caves looking for ways to get deeper and deeper down into the earth. There are doors to open with colour-coded keys, all manner of enemies to avoid, and along with managing your lives you need to keep yourself topped up with air. Mussorgsky drops by in the original game to set the whole thing going with a song. It’s a game that is quick to draw you into its murky world.