The New Year is upon us, and I can think of few better ways to ring in 2009 than by clocking in an unhealthy number of hours on awesome indie games.
Let's kick things off right with Spelunky, brought to us by Derek Yu, co-founder of Bit Blot (creators of the award winning Aquaria) and editor-in-chief of The Independent Gaming Source.
This platformer stars a brazen, whip-wielding treasure hunter – let's call him "Indy" – on a quest for gold and glory. His task is to find the exit to each stage while collecting loot, avoiding traps, and dispatching hostile subterranean critters. In addition to the whip, he starts his adventure off with some rope to scale impossible heights, and a cache of bombs to blast through anything that impedes his progress.
Along the way, you'll encounter the occasional shopkeep who'll trade some of your loot for useful items and powerups. Just as crucially, you'll run into blond damsels-in-distress who need rescuing and give you a health-restoring smooch as your reward. Every level in the game is procedurally generated, so while you'll see a few recurring design elements, no two caves will be the same. This will often mean carefully constructing a path to the exit by blowing away large swaths of the environment, and planting ropes to create efficient routes to ferry damsels, and larger bits of loot.
The adventure ends eventually, I'm told, but so far I haven't had much luck: Spelunky
is brutally hard thanks to all the chaotic boulders, persistent spiders, damsels who freak out and run away, and all the times that you simply run out of supplies. The game tracks your progress, keeping a record of your high score and the number of lives you've squandered in the pursuit of shiny baubles. It's also free. And tiny, weighing in at a meager 11 MB.
Spelunky [TIGSource]
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