With the recent PC release, I’ve fallen back down the deep, unforgiving chasm that is Spelunky. Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic. I love Spelunky and barely need an excuse to play it again. My most recent return to the game coincides with a host of other modern roguelikes (or roguelike-likes, or rogue-lites, if you’re so inclined) that bring with them a philosophy of unapologetically challenging the player.
It’s fascinating that these games are thriving alongside experiential games like Gone Home and broadly accessible blockbusters that are meant to entertain rather than challenge. With that in mind, I wanted to do a little armchair mass-psychoanalysis on why many of us are entranced by roguelikes.
No matter who you are, you’ll die a lot when playing Spelunky, just as in most other roguelikes. These deaths can stem from a series of infelicitous coincidences. They can come from your hubris. They can be caused by your inability to execute your planned move. They all sting, but they are also good deaths. They aren’t sugar-coated, they’re comprehensible, and they provide closure for each playthrough.
These thoughts crystallized as I watched this YouTube interview with Derek Yu (Spelunky’s creator), Doug Wilson, and Anthony Carboni:
The video is well worth watching, but the beginning has some good bits that explain a roguelike’s appeal. Wilson praises Spelunky because “it treats you like an adult.” This isn’t to say that all other games are for kids. Instead, it’s more about finding a game that asks you to agree to consequences for failure. You have to agree to the game’s rules and the time necessary to gain proficiency, or you choose not to play it.
As Derek Yu notes, video games are extremely pedagogical by comparison to other art forms: “When people write a novel for adults, there’s not a section in the middle of the novel that’s like, ‘Oh and here’s a part for people that just started reading,’ but games do that all the time.” So many other games try to aim for some vague middle ground regarding challenges: multiple difficulty levels, sliding challenges based on performance, and the ability to skip challenges entirely. The player is meant to be catered to, placated, and strung along at all costs. Knowledge is something transferred by the game, rather than something accumulated by the player.
Wilson, Yu, and Carboni joke about Spelunky and its similarity to the works of Dostoevsky, but there is a thread of truth there: both works do minimal tutorializing. They expect specific base skills and an interest in improving them. The text doesn’t change to suit your need; you enhance your understanding of it, like you learn enemy patterns and situational awareness. This kind of solidity is refreshing in a sea of quick time events and scaling difficulty. Failure is cruel — but ultimately understandable.
Failure is a core part of the game. As the video shows, a roguelike like Spelunky quickly thwarts its creator. Because you start over after death, each playthrough becomes a self-contained story that never requires the suspension of disbelief needed for many story-driven games. While playing The Last of Us, I saw Joel and Ellie “die” gruesomely dozens of times. These weren’t good deaths because they didn’t mean much: a quick respawn and I’m back where I started, oftentimes with no clear indication of what killed me or how an enemy’s attack range works. Failure thus became a temporary setback that undercuts the structured narrative. My deaths weren’t the canonical ones.
In a roguelike, the game’s story is your story from beginning to end, regardless of how glorious it is. The most unexpected events can be unraveled and explained. Why did that shopkeeper blast you seemingly unprovoked? Well, it turns out an enemy shoplifted something from the store, thus setting off a series of events in which the shopkeeper started rampaging through the level. Your death may have been inevitable, but it was dictated by a series of fascinating rules that are individually static but collectively dynamic. Every failure is another chance to learn more, rather than a simple punishment for not memorizing a scripted sequence.
At the beginning of the video, Yu reminds Wilson to “Try new things, it’s what [Spelunky is all about.” This is true of a variety of levels. Without heavy tutorializing, Spelunky forces you to take risks. The levels themselves change so that you’ll always find new terrain. You’ll also find yourself continually dispatched by new traps and enemy interactions. At the end of each run, you’ll have learned something, tested your skills, and have your own unique story. This story will most likely end with your death, but it will be good.