if you get the bee hive you can generally enter and exit the door real quick to make sure the queen is there then bomb from the outside, nice health bonus from the royal jelly
This is a Hot Tip whereas usually I’m only confident enough to enter a hive with a shotgun
I finished this game after too many hours aiming for True Completion objectives and having read about them now has made me put the game down for a while
Yeah I beat it and have just been waiting to hear what you have to do for the True stuff since I dont really like the secret hunting process myself. I guess the word is out now though?
So on the leaderboards there are “normal”, “hard”, and “special” runs. What you need to do for “hard” is well-known now (and what I’ve been attempting recently), but I think “special” is still a bit of a mystery.
People have definitely got to places that are beyond the “hard” run, but I don’t think anyone has managed to make it count as a “special” run yet.
The jungle seems to have a high spawn rate of Kali shrines and a lot of the enemies there are good bodies for it, so I go out of my way to do a lot of sacrifices there. Also when you already have the blood goblet, a lot of the enemies there bleed so I focus on harvesting their droplets (quite safe with the boomerang), so it’s pretty common to end up with 15 health by Olmec.
Personally I tend to avoid particularly crazy spike/thorn/skulltrap situations requiring very precise acrobatics to navigate, and witch doctors. Note that you can always kill monkeys on your back by pressing the rope button, and also you can rope yourself down into regular spikes and walk to the other end, so how much of a problem those are depends on your rope supply.
Witch doctors are the worst thing in the jungle, by far. I treat every one like an emergency.
I find the spike traps (specifically the idol setup) in the jungle looks way scarier than it actually is. If you move swiftly and don’t double-back the spike traps can never hit you.
Risk assessment is very important here, and if something looks particularly dicey just bomb it out. No reason to risk the whole run on a single precise movement if you don’t have to.
god what a good trick!
I started exploring the optional areas now. It’s wild how much better-looking the temple is than in Spelunky HD especially considering it’s an optional area now. More unique enemy types in it too. And Anubis having a throne more thoughtfully telegraphs that this is a key enemy you should probably try to kill. It starts to explain why Spelunky 2 took a decade to make.
Yeah, it’s a cool good area (and very difficult – much more than Tide Pool).
Just got the farthest I’ve ever gotten on a hard run, and died to a hired hand. Never again!
He threw a yeti corpse on ice which sent it and me flying into spikes.
God damn it I forgot a specific cape’s controls while over spikes on ANOTHER hard run. Died again in the ice caves while having all the hard requirements up to that point.
I’ll get there eventually – need to stop being careless!
I died once thinking the floaty cape worked as a toggle instead of as a hold, since that’s how it worked in Spelunky HD…
Yeah luckily it has been years and years since I played the first, so those old controls weren’t too stuck in my head. I even made the switch to hold R2 to walk, which I know most people immediately toggled back. There’s a bunch of little control differences, though, which is part of what makes S2 hard to wrangle for veterans of the original.
I like most of the control changes, but I will say that (volcano secret item) Vlad’s cape not working the same as a turkey is maddening, and that difference is why I died. They give you the same movement–a double jump plus float–but with Vlad’s you have to double jump before it lets you float and a turkey can float any time.
Out of curiosity, do you still have the journal page?
I immediately played another right after posting, so I don’t have the recap if that’s what you’re asking for – it was another successful (up to that point) hard mode run. I had basically every item I wanted, other than a weapon.
The one I played immediately after was the daily, which had a pretty great 1-1 and then I accidentally sacrificed myself on 1-2 trying to save 1 rope.
Guess I’m done with Spelunky for the day! I’m playing sooo greedy.
Oh, I just figured out what journal page you were talking about – I think I forgot that was even there. Keeps track of what items you got in what areas + conducts.
I don’t have the self-control not to take the teleporter pack every time I see it. This time I found it in a wall, but I’ll steal it every time, too. It’s pretty easy to avoid/deaggro the shop keepers with it. And I’ve gotten good at being careful about pressing the jump button, but I still die when some random enemy hits me in the back and I teleport into a wall. It’s a lot safer in carrying form, but then you can’t carry anything else!
I was JUST about to swap it out, too – I really should have dropped it at the entrance of the secret area in Volcano like my gut was telling me to do.
Going back for replays to do the “hard” ending etc it really strikes me how much the opening area sucks and how tedious it is to go through the same steps of getting the Eye (if you’re going the Black Market route). Volcano/Drill route all the way.
You can get around the eye requirement for both the jungle and volcano routes, but it’s a little tricky.
I do think the game would benefit from an alternate path early game as I said higher in the the thread.
I’ve seen a lot of others complain too that the opening area is “tedious” but I’m not seeing it yet. I’m pretty consistently getting different sets of gear, and the in-level optimizations are pretty engaging still. It’s really really hard to do everything perfectly and you have to make a lot of decisions fairly quickly.
Of course, I’m also a person who’s played nearly 1000 hours of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and often play games where you do the same levels over and over to get better (Trackmania, Dustforce) so I might be immune to this brand of tedium.
This cuts two ways is the thing. Strictly speaking, world 1 is much more involving than it was in Spelunky HD – in intellect, dexterity and risk assessment. But what does that do to the overall pacing and emotional curve of the game? I’m forced to frontload a huge amount of effort to a run which hasn’t gotten anywhere yet and will probably not go very far regardless of the effort I put in.
In Spelunky HD I could take it easy in the mines and if I got lucky and got some great items (or otherwise felt like it), then I could switch to “put actual attention to this run” mode. The changes of pace made it easier to play for long stretches, whereas with Spelunky 2 it feels like it wants me to play every run as if it was a daily challenge.
