Headscratchers / Spelunky

• How exactly can you wear both types of power-up shoes (and both types of power-up gloves) simultaneously?
  • You got two feet, right? And two hands.
  • They combine like the beams in Metroid games. Boots with springs on the bottoms and spikes on the bottoms of the springs, or Climbing Gloves that are slightly modified to support throwing as well as climbing.
  • In Spelunky 2, how does LISE Project wear either of the power-up shoes? She has giant treads for feet!
• In order to take a shopkeeper's shotgun, you kill him. He is dead. Then you head to the next level, and he's guarding the exit door. Wasn't he dead a minute ago? As in, "not alive"?
  • There are multiple shopkeepers. They just look alike.
  • Why would any other shopkeeper want to kill you? There's no possible way they could have heard about your murderous rampage.
    • They are part of a guild of shopkeepers, and they just know.
    • If shopkeepers are currently in "shoot on sight" mode, every shop has a "Wanted!" Poster with the Spelunker's face. Word gets around.
  • In Spelunky 2, it was revealed that all shopkeepers are clones from one unfortunate man who was abducted by the mothership. There is just an infinite supply of them.
• Why are the Damsels so grateful when you take them one level deeper into the cave? It just doesn't seem like a very helpful thing to do for a non-Spelunker in distress.
  • Perhaps there's some sort of Damsel-escape route in the little passage between levels. Like a fixed teleporter linked back to the title screen or something. Unless the Damsels just hit the suicide button and get warped back out or something.
  • Maybe they are using the shortcuts that Tunnel Man opens.
  • They're in a location with no traps and no monsters. It's safer than they were before.
• How is the Tunnel Man even creating his shortcuts, since wouldn't his efforts be moot if the ruins' change interior every visit? This seems to be the case if the Spelunker blows up any blocks, but on the next trip, they are supposedly restored to normal.
  • It's possible that the entrances to different levels are in the same place but the rooms around it move
  • As well, whenever a room is loaded, there is generally one path to the exit. Why wouldn't the shortcuts work like that as well?
  • Maybe the shortcuts take you to the room right before the first level of a world, I.e. where you find the Tunnel Man. And since the door in that room is automatically linked to the entrance of the first level, it's all good. And the reason the shortcuts don't show up in those rooms is because there's a door with the texture of the background walls.
• Why does the robot have blood? Also, how does it have a ghost?
• Failure to plan?
  • Bombs and climbing gloves exist in this universe and 99 of the former can be carried easily by a single individual. Yet the spelunker decides to enter the cave with four bombs and without climbing gloves. Is he Too Dumb to Live?
    • He's poor. Nobody enters the cursed ruins of Olmec who could afford 99 bombs in the first place.
  • What was your plan, once you reach the bottom of the cave? Did you plan to find an active volcano that just happened to erupt at the right time and carry you back to the surface? (As opposed to no volcano, or a volcano that erupts before you reach the bottom and kill you instantly...)
    • This is probably a reference to Journey to the Center of the Earth, with its similarly unplanned and highly unlikely ending.
  • Did you bring a flashlight? You know, in case you encounter some darkness in the cave. Oh right, you always just find flares!
• How are the shopkeepers able to get into levels you just unlocked the door to before you? For instance if you just unlocked the door to the city of gold or hell there's already a shopkeeper at the bottom waiting for you.

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