Spelunker Party!
The Descent Part 3
How do you convince people to pay for a video game that is already free? God knows we’re stupid enough to buy bottled water, so how far of a stretch is it to pay money for a free game? Mom Hid My Game! removed all of its ads and decided that was enough to tack on five bucks. Levels+: Addictive Puzzle Game not only took out their microtransactions but added a “+” to “Levels,” justifying a $7 price tag. MUJO decided to just give everyone the middle finger and charge $10 for the Switch version of the free-to-play game while changing nothing, including the in-game microtransactions.
Spelunker World, meanwhile, has masqueraded onto the Switch eShop as Spelunker Party! I’m not actually excited for the game, but supposedly some video game companies believe we should be and thus include exclamation marks in their titles. Punctuation aside, Spelunker Party! makes a few changes to its free-to-play counterpart, including removing the ability to play with up to six people. Microtransactions are gone, and in their place is a $30 admission fee. Regardless of the game’s price, if you’re a sucker like me and grabbed the game, you still ended up paying a chunk of change for a free game, one that still reeks of money-grubbing game design.
What is it?
Spelunker Party! is about death and sadness. Your collection of characters is genetically predisposed to die by any kind of outside force, to the point that their parents didn’t think they’d live long enough to need a practical name. Instead, you get these quality labels:
- Spelunker, the man who spelunks and whose eyes show the emptiness of his soul
- Spelunkette, the female version who spelunks but with soul
- Spelunkette’s Sister, Spelunkette’s blond sister
- And Dark Spelunker, who supposedly had parents who took one look at him and said, “Wow, this guy looks like an evil piece of shit and like that other guy”
Ignoring their names, they are prone to use up their five lives per level pretty quickly. Spikes, large boulders, fire, and venomous snakes all logically lead you to a gruesome E-rated death. Bat guano also delivers a kill shot, presumably due to all the immediate diseases from flying poop. Then, of course, any fall greater than three feet breaks every damn bone in your brittle body. This propensity toward death becomes somewhat endearing once you realize this is the Spelunker series’ defining feature.
You and up to three other players can adventure through over 100 stages, exploring the underground for treasure and collectible artifacts. The main goal is to reach the end of the cavern, which often requires you to find keys strewn about the stage to reach new checkpoints. These checkpoints are vital because they replenish your ever-depleting energy reserves while serving as your recall point when you die. If you lose all your lives, your teammates have 30 seconds to backtrack and touch your body back to life. If everyone dies, your corpses forever rot in their place. Game over.
Platforming is the key focus of the overall game, and oftentimes, success is based on timing and quick reflexes. You have a few items to aid your trek, such as bombs that clear the road, flares which scare away enemies, a blow dryer which exorcises ghosts, and an animal companion that offers various benefits. Gear sets also impact your character’s survivability, and new gear becomes unlocked as you collect artifacts or pay a dog to dig up more. Rinse and repeat all of this and you got yourself a Spelunker Party!
What’s good?
- Playing with multiple people enhances the experience. With a team of four people, collecting keys and progressing through a level feels streamlined and fluid. If a teammate loses all lives, another player is likely to be around for a quick revive. It doesn’t matter if you fail as an individual because you have friendship.
- There is a wealth of content. If you can ignore the game’s faults, the massive amount of stages and achievements will offer you tens of hours of playtime. If you’re a 100% completionist, you just found the only game you need for the next year.
- When the game is fair, it’s fun. A competent hand designed many of the stage layouts; the same cannot be said for whoever placed the hazards throughout the stage. Consequently, when a stage is focused on layout and less on insta-death obstacles, you’re presented with a true platforming challenge.
What’s bad?
- Deaths often feel cheap and luck-based, if they aren’t outright caused by frame rate issues or glitches. Levels are typically split into three to four distinct sections, and by the third section, the number of hazards skyrockets. The ass in me assumes these difficulty spikes are the result of a microtransaction mindset. Allow the players to almost complete a stage, then kill them in the final section so that they pay money for extra lives. Without microtransactions, you still die the same amount; you just have to live with a game over. Yes, “gitting gud” will reduce deaths, but when a bat shits at random intervals over a time-based platforming section while your energy depletes, I want my luck stat to be better, not my gaming skillz.
- If you want to see all the game has to offer, you better have at least two or three dedicated friends. The online community was dead when I bought the game on release day, and I have never found an online party since. This would be fine if you could access all the game’s content by yourself, but without partners, certain paths and collectibles are inaccessible.
- Padding is pervasive. If you just push from Point A to Point B in every stage, you’re in a good mindset. If you have the slightest bit of hope of collecting everything, prepare to double Spelunker Party!’s(?) content by replaying each stage. Several collectibles hide behind largely unassuming breakable walls or beyond a large gap with invisible platforms, so collecting these items typically calls for indiscriminate bombing and leaps of faith. Outside of this, many artifacts are entirely inaccessible without specific gear, so the ability to obtain everything on your first run-through of a stage is near impossible.
Spelunker Party! also features a compelling story of static images and impeccable grammar.
What’s the verdict?
Spelunker Party! is so frustrating because it had promise. If the developers took a little more time to curb the free-to-play-but-pay-to-live difficulty, reduce the collect-a-thon focus, and kill the bugs, I could have recommended this claustrophobic adventure. Instead, these issues have drained me of any motivation to complete anything beyond the main stages, just so I could say I beat the game. At the end of the day, why pay $30 for this game when you can instead pay nothing and not play this game?
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 5
- Time Played: Over 15 hours
- Number of Players: 1-4
- Games Like It on Switch: SteamWorld Dig 2, Minecraft