YMMV / Spelunky

• Adaptation Displacement: The commercial version is a lot more well-known than the freeware version.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • A downplayed example comes in 2, in the form of the various "Pack" items; when a "Pack" item either takes a ton of damage in rapid succession (usually if it gets shot with a Shotgun), or is hit by fire, it will explode, dealing 10 damage... Even if it's on the spelunker's back — at which point you'll be forced to tank 10 HP worth of damage, which for most cases, is effectively a OHKO. Be it the weapons pack, the hoverpack, the telepack, and yes, even the jetpack of HD fame got hit with this, if it has "pack" in the name, odds are, you'll need to be careful lest it blows up in your face, literally.
  • Also in 2 the Shotgun without a power pack and the Plasma Cannon can become this thanks to their recoil now knocking you off of ropes or other climbing surfaces, alongside the greater prevalence of enemies and surfaces that can send your projectiles right back at you and the chance that firing could destroy the ghost pot offscreen it's sometimes safer to go without a firearm. Really any weapon or tool that you manually hold can become impractical if you're going for the hard or special endings given you'll need to carry several quest items through levels, though this can be mitigated by Waddler allowing you to store items for later use.
• Breather Level: Tide Pool in Spelunky 2. It takes a little to get used to, but after that, it becomes the easiest level in the entire game. Yes, easier than any level before it.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In 2, it's much more common for experienced players to choose Volcana over the Jungle as their second area. The only deadly traps are the lava, which always comes with platforms to get over it, and the Spike Balls, which are highly visible and have a decent startup time, unlike the Jungle, which has Spear Traps which deal 4 damage and Bear Traps which are an instakill. Additionally, the enemies here include Imps who carry magma pots (easy to bait out the pot and then kill the Imp), Robots (which only chase you as far as the ledge of the platform they're on), and Fire Bugs (which have a very telegraphed attack and use it intermittently), and even Rock Dogs can be tamed, whipped, or avoided. The Jungle, by contrast, has Mantraps and Witch Doctors. Volcana's hidden area is also much simpler to find since the drill is fully visible at the top of the map, whereas the Black Market's entrance must be searched out via the Udjat Eye's blinking and opened with a bomb, and easier to take advantage of since freeing Van Horsing will have him kill Vlad for you, whereas the player will either need to stock up on money or trigger the rage of shopkeepers to get the Market's bounty. To top it all off, Volcana's unique prize item, Vlad's Cape, is considered a Game-Breaker that outweighs anything the Jungle could provide. The only real advantage of the Jungle is the easier availability of paste due to Giant Spiders, and even that item can be found in shops and crates anywhere.
  • Likewise in 2, Tide Pool is overly preferred over The Temple for a long list of reasons. Tide Pool is just easier than The Temple by a long shot, and unlike The Temple, it's possible to exploit the lava trap in 4-3 in order to keep the Ankh, while being able to get to the secret exit and defeat its secret boss to get the Tablet of Destiny, and thus get access to Qilin to reach the Sunken City. Not only that, but Tun's reward from her Stars Challenge in The Temple is significantly worse. The Elixir, while one of only three possible ways to remove the Curse status effect (the others being dying with an Ankh, and standing on a Kali Altar and getting any reward after the first), can quickly become pointless if you're trying to reach Duat; reaching that location requires dying with the Ankh, which will remove your Curse anyway, and if you aren't cursed, all the health gained from drinking the Elixir will be lost as soon as you sacrifice yourself to Kali in the City of Gold. Not only that, if you already have a Kapala, The Temple also has the Mummies which will be more than happy to help you reach 99 health, thus making its healing properties pointless in comparison! The Clone Gun you can gain in Tide Pool, on the other hand, provides many overpowered strategies, such as obtaining up to 3 extra Kapalas in co-op runs, being able to get Qilin to the Sunken City and the Cosmic Ocean, getting 99 bombs and ropes from cloning the Corpse Bag from the Sun Challenge, and much, much more. Because of this, the only reason you would want to get to The Temple willingly would be for scorerunning, or to get the Scepter (see Game-Breaker below) and use it to trivialize getting the regular ending.
    • It is worth noting that, since the Elixir's buff of doubling all healing and a one-time protection from curse and poison, and the discovery and optimization of several skips to reach the Sunken City without Qilin, allowing players to go to the Temple and still keep the Ankh on Sunken City/Cosmic Ocean runs, the choice often now comes down to individual player skill and what's needed in any given run. Tide Pool is still easier, has easier to execute Ankh saves and The Clone Gun, but many think that the Elixir's protection and the ability to get the Space Compass for smoother Cosmic Ocean pathing is worth enough to consider making a trip to the Temple in spite of it's comparatively higher danger.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Spelunky Classic/Spelunky HD:
    • Those yetis. Those chain-throwing, whip-invulnerable, blue-nippled yetis…
    • The actual spiders, whose unpredictable jump patterns make them some of the most dangerous enemies in the game.
    • And cultists who throw you around the same way as yetis. They also jump around very fast. At least they're vulnerable to your whip.
    • The Croc Men are basically cultists who teleport right before they take damage, making them nearly invincible. They can also teleport right onto the player for a One-Hit Kill.
    • Perhaps the most unexpectedly deadly enemy in video-game history (barring the carp): Frogs. Completely unpredictable jump patterns and timing, inexplicable ability to predict your next movement, and quick vertical movements that make them difficult to take down with the whip. You will die by frog at some point.
    • Last but not least: Angry Shopkeepers. They're fast, unpredictable, and their shotguns will tear through your already-low HP. The safest bet against them? Don't piss them off in the first place. Of course, sometimes you don't get to choose whether or not they get angry. For example, if their shop has a spike trap right outside of it, and an exploding frog gets hit by it, and his dying explosion damages the shop, you will get labeled as a terrorist, and have to deal with angry shopkeepers for the rest of the run. This can occur without you ever seeing the frog, the shop, or the spikes.
  • Spelunky 2:
    • Cave Moles. They're fast, often burrow out of the ground when you're not expecting it and/or not paying attention, have very generous invincibility during said burrowing, and the game enjoys throwing them at you in packs or when you're already dealing with some other danger. Not to mention, they've got 3 hit points, which may not sound like much, but this makes them the strongest standard enemies at that point in the game besides Cavemen, and means a single Arrow from a loose Arrow Trap will not OHKO it.
    • Horned Lizards can also take three hits, and barrel towards you at high speed with immunity to your Goomba Stomp if aggro'd. This typically results in either you getting knocked high into the air or into a nearby trap for more damage, other enemies or NPCs getting flung into you for more damage, or being knocked back in front of them while they're still rolling, which can easily lead to a Cycle of Hurting into Yet Another Stupid Death. On top of all that, they don't even have the courtesy of producing a corpse when killed, much like Mantraps, which makes sacrificing them to Kali much more difficult.
    • Witch Doctors in the Jungle. If they spot you, unless you can knock them unconscious in time, they'll cast a voodoo spell that is unavoidable, deals damage and knocks you down. Considering the Jungle is littered with instakill and highly-damaging traps and enemies, being unavoidably knocked down can prove quickly fatal. Even taking them out is risky, as each one has a skull effigy circling around them that can fly through walls and inflicts curse, a very debilitating status effect that makes you a One-Hit-Point Wonder and is immensely difficult to get rid of ^note (assuming that you're not in the Cosmic Ocean, where a lack of altars means that you can't get rid of it at all).
    • Lavamanders in Volcana. They are rare, but incredibly dangerous, as they spit instant-kill lava towards you when you approach and there are very few easy ways to kill them. This wouldn't be so bad, except this game has fluid physics, and lava can't simply be removed by bombing it out this time around, so just one of these guys heaving a couple times can be enough to completely flood the path you need to go down with insurmountable globs of lava, making it literally impossible to progress if you don't have bombs or other ways to get through terrain.
    • Vlad in Volcana. In HD, he was more or less a more beefy vampire, and dropped a rather underwhelming cape — you mostly would fight him if he got in the way of you getting his Amulet. In 2, however, he's clearly been training, though, because he can now teleport. And Tele-Frag, for that matter. If you aren't careful, he can easily OHKO you if he does that, a la the Croc Men from HD. Fortunately, should you brave him, the rewards are much more valuable than they were in HD, so it's worth it to take the time to fight him if you can — and should you not be up to snuff, by saving Van Horsing in 2-1, he'll fight him along with you, giving you an almost guaranteed victory as he happens to be capable of OHKOing Vlad himself, before he even wakes up.
    • Necromancers in the Temple. They aren't capable of attacking directly, but they make up for it by summoning hordes of skeleton minions and reviving dead enemies. They have a frustratingly large aggro radius, capable of detecting the player well before they're onscreen, regardless of any obstacles. They don't even have to be on the same layer — a Necromancer hidden in a background area can still create hazards to harass the player in the foreground. Their revival ability is especially dangerous, as they can instantly resurrect any creature that has a corpse in their vicinity. This includes incredibly dangerous foes such as Croc Men and Angry Shopkeepers. Worse, Necromancers themselves leave corpses when killed, so if you're unlucky enough to face two of them, they can and will endlessly revive each other any time you try to kill one.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Caveman Shopkeepers in 2. In a game where everything wants your head, he stands out for being one of the most level-headed things to encounter, selling items for incredibly cheap — while most of the items he sells tend to be junk or very easy to find outside his shop, such as pots or rocks or arrows, he sells cooked turkey (a quick and simple +1 HP consumable) for dirt cheap, and can even stock some items of immense value for fractions of their standard price, including the dang Plasma Cannon, as early as 1-2! You'd be hard pressed to find a player who doesn't at least respect these lot, and some players will explicitly buy the junk off of him in addition to his more useful items because he's just a friendly individual.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Officially, both the freeware and Updated Re-release are called Spelunky. To differentiate them, the community usually refers to the freeware one as "Spelunky Classic", while the rerelease is "Spelunky HD" or just "HD".
  • In general, any sufficiently silly way to die or otherwise mess up in these games is often referred to as "Getting Spelunked", as coined by the late Twiggle.
  • "Hulk Hands" for the Climbing Gloves, which are green.
  • The dog damsel is called Monty by Northernlion (which was adopted in Spelunky 2), Rufus by Baertaffy, and Major Stupid by Israel Blargh!.
  • Baertaffy also calls the sloth damsel Eddie.
  • Israel Blargh! is also responsible for a host of other nicknames, including:
    • For the cat and oversized hamster pets introduced in Spelunky 2, Viggo and Trepinator, respectively.
    • Paco Espelanko for the 'Lime' Spelunker.
    • Gronks for Hired Hands.
    • Ratface and Grey Weirdo for Tun, the mystic merchant in Spelunky 2 and her brother Beg, the servant of chaos.
    • Pepe for Apep, the eldritch snake from Duat in Spelunky 2.
    • Antonio Banderas for Yang in Spelunky 2.
    • For Waddler: Gloop, Gobulugar [?], Steve, and a host of unmentioned others because identity fraud.
  • The default Spelunker, sometimes called Iowa Jack (after Indiana Jones), Indie (ditto, but also in recognition of Spelunky being an indie game), or Derek (after Derek Yu).
  • The 'Van Helsing' Spelunker, called Abraholm von Drake by decimator1337.
  • The fat teal Spelunker is sometimes called the Chub Scout as a pun on "Cub Scout" (possibly because his coffin only generates in tiki villages in the Jungle).
  • Thwomp Blocks for the crush traps in the Temple.
  • Variants of Cavemen, sometimes called Igors.
  • The male damsel is frequently referred to as Mansel, and the dog version the Pugsel.
  • Alpharad calls hired hands Gregs.
  • Olmech or Oltech, for the second phase of Olmec in Spelunky 2, where he reveals his nature of having become cybernetically enhanced, shooting bombs and deploying UFOs.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Getting a jetpack greatly improves your chances of survival. If you can get a shotgun on top of that…
  • Then there's the Scepter, which fires practically-instant-death projectiles ^note it deals 10 damage per shot, which is technically survivable, but Spelunky is a game where only bosses have double-digit HP naturally, and the player has to be playing ridiculously well to have more than 10 health at a time that chase enemies and go through walls. Unfortunately, you can't break the game with that indefinitely, and in the remake, the projectiles can just as easily kill you if you happen to end up between them and whatever they've locked on to. Or if they lock on to something behind or on top of you.
  • Playing as the Tunnel Man in the original lets you use his mattock, which never breaks. You can tear through terrain to your heart's content without having to resort to explosives. The trade-off? You can't attack in midair with it, you start with no ropes or bombs, and he has half the default HP of the other characters.
  • The Kapala. Received by acquiring 16 Faith Points from Kali, it can be a total game changer; you know those blood particles that bounce around aesthetically? Those aren't aesthetic — if you have a Kapala, you can scoop them up, and if you get enough of them, you'll get +1 HP. No fuss, no having to go to the exit, just an outright extra hit point if you can get enough. More enemies bleed when hit than enemies that don't. If you get this, you can amass hilariously high amounts of HP to the point where the only thing that could take you down is taking damage from a source of instant death, or some freak accident where you get constantly combo'd. And in HD, the Mummy's Vomit counts as blood... Cue sitting on a ledge underneath one as it spews on you for a quick and easy way to get to 99 health.
  • In HD, Vlad's Cape was a bit too late to be useful and really only ever grabbed for its journal entry. In 2 however, that all changed — no longer is Vlad's Cape limited to just Hell; instead, it's right in Volcana, one of the choices for the second world of the game. In addition to its double-jump and gliding ability being more useful in 2 as much of the terrain in the following levels is much more conductive to such abilities than the level terrain in HD's Hell was, Vlad's Cape also has a new property of doubling the blood particles dropped by enemies or NPCs that take damage. While this may seem like a small thing, it is anything but if you manage to acquire a certain item — namely, the aforementioned other Game Breaker, the Kapala. Add to that the fact that the Jetpack got a mild nerf in 2, and suddenly Vlad's Cape went from a mostly forgettable item in HD, to a must-have for many explorers in 2!
  • The multiplayer ghosts in 2. In the first game, they could use their breath to move things around, which, while useful, wasn't particularly broken. Come 2 and now you can charge up your breath to upgrade it into a freeze ray shot — stunning enemies and allowing incredibly easy one-hit kills on them. What makes it so game-breaking is that the only things it doesn't work on are Yetis (including the King and Queen) and Kingu. Everything else is fair game — Shopkeepers, Quillback, Osiris, even Tiamat and Hundun's heads aren't immune.
• Goddamned Bats: Almost every enemy in the game. There's goddamned spiders, goddamned yetis, goddamned cavemen, goddamned frogs, and so on. Bats themselves are quite slow and predictable, but because they spawn hanging from ceilings and are obviously capable of flight, they're hard to kill safely because they always seem to attack from just above where your whip hits the air.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the original, normally an enemy would eventually stop bleeding if you smacked its body around enough. This was not the case if you happened to throw the body onto spikes, where the body would gush blood indefinitely as long as you kept impaling it. Combine this bit of knowledge with the Kapala and you've got a source of infinite hit points, provided you don't impale yourself on said spikes and that the Ghost isn't breathing down your neck (unless you happen to have the Hedjet).
  • Another method of generating infinite blood would be to drop one or more corpses in a narrow space, then bring a stone over and drop it, then pick it back up repeatedly. This will cause the corpse(s) to get struck by the stone repeatedly, causing them to bleed a little every them they got hit. This is also fixed in the HD version.
  • Mummy vomit counts as blood for the sake of the Kapala. Lure a mummy to a ledge, hang down under him, and drink the delicious substance to recover health! This even carried over in 2.
  • Sometimes monsters that get released from a pot end up half-embedded in the floor and unable to move.
  • In the remake, upon beating Olmec with the Ball and Chain, the ending will glitch up in a hilarious way: The ball and chain will cause your character to walk to the chest slowly. When they get to the chest, the platform below it would be gone, but the chest will still be locked. The chest will then open, and the idol will then fall into the lava. An earthquake starts and the character will then be thrown out of the volcano with the idol. Then it carries on normally. See here to watch said cutscene.
  • While it's since been patched out, it was possible to get rid of the Ghost in 2 by having a Goliath Frog eat it in the Sunken City.
• Heartwarming Moments: The basic story of the sequel alone is very nice; Guy Spelunky, fully grown up, has had a happy family with Tina Flan, and has had a child. Once him and his squad once again got lost in the Caves of Olmec, it falls upon Ana Spelunky, his own daughter, to come and rescue them. And, against all odds, she succeeds!
  • On a meta level: In 2's credits is a special section for various let's players, speedrunners, and glitch-hunters for the original game, a trend that continues into the Special Thanks.
• Nausea Fuel: The Kapala may be bad enough on its own, due to the fact the player will collect blood from various sources (humans, yetis, spiders, etc.) and then drink it to regain health… however, blood is not the only thing the spelunker can collect with the cup. In the Temple level, the hero can actually collect mummy vomit in the Kapala; that's right, you as the player can camp out under a mummy as it continuously rains vomit on your head, and then drink said vomit to gain ludicrous amounts of health (and esophagus burns from your own vomiting).
• Nightmare Fuel: Spelunky often punishes you for attempting to rush through levels without caution, so naturally, you would think to keep a steady pace, slowly disabling all the traps ahead of you. Everything seems to be going fine… until the music slows down and distorts, and you receive the message "A chill runs down your spine! Let's get out of here!" By that time, this is likely what you're doing. Dawdle around more or take too long trying to find the exit, and the ghost suddenly appears. If it's not enough that it has a tortured, agonized facial expression,◊ it constantly homes in on you, flies through any solid object, and instantly kills you on contact. And when it finally does you in, your body turns to bone and withers away immediately. Also doubles as Paranoia Fuel.
  • In the XBLA/GoG/Steam re-release, the ghost has been given a makeover.◊ Have fun sleeping. Oh, and the remake also has this unsettling ambiance when the ghost is following you, this eerie bonging noise with the sounds of electronic buzzing which implies its presence is making EM-sensitive items go crazy.
    • Then it turns into Nightmare Retardant when you take a picture of it with a camera◊.
  • In the remakes, dying while in multiplayer mode turns your character into a little ghost… with the same sort of distorted and agonized expression.
  • The ghost will also appear if you pick up the Crystal Skull on a Restless Dead level or if you destroy three or more altars, although the music only distorts when a ghost spawns normally. Picking up a Crystal Skull means two ghosts will pursue you, though. So, what's the best way to avoid having two ghosts after you (aside from staying away from the skull)? Just blow up the platform underneath the Skull and go on your way. What's that? You don't have any bombs? Oh, dear…
    • Oh, and if you destroy three altars, there's no more time limit. The ghost will be chasing you nonstop for the rest of the game. Have fun.
  • And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the Ghost returns in the sequel with some more tricks up its sleeve. While it takes three minutes to show up now^note Or five, if you picked up a four-leaf clover, it shows up right when the message pops up this time around, is faster, tracks you down into side areas ensuring you can't hide, and if evaded for long enough, now splits into two, and possibly even four smaller ghosts that are much faster, circle around you, and eventually box you in if you can't find the exit. Now even simply evading it isn't a viable option — you have to leave, or it will most likely kill you unless you happen to have a Camera... and Cameras aren't nearly as common as they are in HD.
    • Worse still, there are now breakable pots in each level that immediately cause the Ghost to spawn if broken, similar to the Crystal Skull from the first game. Yes, that's right, pots. Fragile pots that you can easily and accidentally toss a rock into while trying to disable traps or fight off enemies around you. As if there already wasn't enough Paranoia Fuel surrounding this thing...
  • Giant Spiders are also incredibly traumatizing. They're absolutely immense in size, easily double the horizontal size of the player. They wait along the ceiling, sometimes out of sight of the player, and when their prey happens upon the area beneath them, they drop down from the ceiling, which, since you're at level 1, with hardly any Hit Points to spare, you're going to be annihilated. It does 2 hearts of damage, jumps all over the place, and never stops chasing you once provoked. Arachnophobes will have a field day with this thing. Fortunately, in 2, it no longer appears in the first area, though this does make getting bomb paste much harder.
    • The Spiders' Lair special level, which spawns four of these all in a group, as well as a ton of ordinary spiders and webs, showcases the game at its most knowingly sadistic. Note that it's possible for this level to generate with the lights out as well. Oh joy.
  • The 2nd area of the game, the Jungle, has the optional boss, a giant piranha nicknamed Ol' Bitey. It's incredibly fast, homes in on you when you fall into the water in a Rushing Water level, and in general looks terrifying.◊ If that wasn't enough, his flesh constantly decays◊ as you fight him, showing bits of exposed bone matter. Squick.
  • Reaching the Mothership in Spelunky 2 leads to the disturbing Fridge Horror reveal that the aliens were creating a Clone Army of shopkeepers the whole time. Throughout the sub-area, several machines churn out dozens of proto-shopkeeper enemies that look hideously deformed. Occasionally, a normal shopkeeper emerges from the spawners, implying that it takes dozens of failed attempts to make one good shopkeeper. Then you see a gigantic shopkeeper figure suspended in a test tube at the top of the level...
  • The Sunken City, the secret final world in 2. A strange ruin filled with eyes, mouths, collapsing bone piles, and the return of Spelunky 1's resident Goddamned Spider, the frogs, complete with their explosive cousins, combined with some of the creepiest music in the game, especially when it’s dark.
• Nintendo Hard: Beyond the standard hardness that comes with being a roguelike, Spelunky is remarkably unforgiving. It's very common for for one wrong button press or standing on the wrong tile for just a moment to abruptly end what was otherwise a great run — typically through instant-kills, or enemies/hazards that can stunlock the player.
• Older Than They Think: Some people believed that the concept of shopkeepers forgiving you if you committed a crime and then went clean for long enough was a new addition to Spelunky 2. In actuality, it's existed since the original freeware game; it was just much harder for most players to trigger since everything bad that happens to a shopkeeper is immediately blamed on you. That said, the message that notifies you when you've been forgiven is a new addition to the game - the others silently remove the shops' Wanted posters and the shopkeepers camping the end of the level.
• Player Punch: In the sequel, you can get poisoned by certain enemies. The only straightforward way to make the poison go away is by rescuing Monty, who subsumes the ailment after the level switches when he licks you. It can certainly make players feel like jerks, even if Monty comes back no worse for wear with each level.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Blackout Basement style levels make the game much more frustrating than it already is. In a game where you absolutely need to be aware of your surroundings at all times, your visibility is very limited, and using the torch provided for you at the start of said levels is almost a necessity… at the expense of having to leave an item you're carrying behind at least temporarily, if not forever. Even though the traps are lit, it's only a small amount of help. And Kali help you if you're trying to get everything you want in the stage and the Ghost shows up… The one saving grace is that they won't appear if you completed the previous level in under 20 seconds, so they won't screw up your speedrun attempts.
  • The way Spelunky 2's Sun Challenge works. Either you're bounced around uncontrollably and are slowly pushed to death without any chance of recovery - or you hide in one corner and are able to simple wait it out without even having to press any button in ten seconds.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: And how! Spelunky was already a hard game, but the sequel elevates things to nearly Platform Hell levels; not only are the levels considerably harder, but several game mechanics actively work to not only hinder the player, but also invalidate strategies that were reliable in the first game. A few examples:
  • The first level, the Dwelling, is already building a reputation of being leagues harder than the Mines ever were — more dart traps, moles that can burrow through tiles and ambush you when you least expect it, lizards that can quickly lunge at you and either kill you via Cycle of Hurting or else by knocking you into an environmental hazard, and the boss at the end, while not too hard once you've figured him out, can easily instakill a careless or ill-prepared player.
  • One of the new second stages is essentially a throwback to Hell, the Brutal Bonus Level of the first game, with all the instant-death lava you could ask for. And it's the second level. And the easier of the two to get to, at that!
  • The alternate second level is the old Jungle, but with some nasty new tricks — spike traps that can be tough to identify at a glance and will skewer a careless player, and instant-death beartraps that blend in very well with the jungle foliage.
  • Killing shopkeepers was a risky, but reliable, way of ensuring plentiful items, a powerful Shotgun, and all the bombs and ropes you could need in the first game — all you had to do was fight past them at the exit of every floor which, while daunting, wasn't too tough for a skilled player. Here, robbing shopkeepers is a lot less attractive — either you or they are likely to destroy most of the shops' inventories with all the gunfire, and the further you progress (and the more of them you kill), the more they'll stack the odds against you: not only will you start having to deal with multiple shopkeepers guarding the exits, but they'll start setting up checkpoints and guard points of interest throughout the stages, making progression even harder as you go.
  • The new status ailments force players to change up their style — Poison forces you to rush, lest the Poison kill you, and Curse forces you to be very, very careful, as any source of damage will kill you instantly. Both also force you to priorize saving Pets above all else, as rescuing or sacrificing one (respectively) is the only reliable way to cure the ailment. Screw up and get a Pet killed while Poisoned with barely any HP left? Odds are you're going to die before you can rescue the one on the next stage — assuming you can even get that far. Get cursed or poisoned in the Cosmic Ocean? There are no pets or altars, and it's a Marathon Level, so you're pretty much boned.
• Spoiled by the Format: Several journal entries in the second game for certain enemies refer to the identity of the new Big Bad, Queen Tiamat, well before the player has any idea who they are.
  • Angering Tun has her reference the name of the True Final Boss:
    Tun: You must be a servant of Hundun!
• That One Level:
  • The Dwelling from Spelunky 2 is earning this reputation, despite (or perhaps because of) being the first level. Cave Moles are a nasty ambush foe that are great at damaging a player when least expected, Lizards can easily kill the player via Cycle of Hurting or launching them into environmental hazards, Dart Traps are much more abundant than they were in the previous game, and the last floor is guarded by a boss that can One-Hit Kill ill-prepared or reckless players. It's not uncommon for the bulk of a player's deaths to occur in the Dwelling, even after they become more skilled and experienced.
  • Also from the remake, the Temple and Neo Babylon can be incredibly frustrating, owing to many moving traps that will one-hit you, and the former with various very difficult mooks.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: An adorable cartoon platformer in a Super-Deformed style about a plucky, upbeat adventurer, which happens to feature Human Sacrifice, exploding bodies, Eldritch Abominations, and shoplifting.

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