Achieving: A Rogue’s Tale from Spelunky

This is why I love roguelikes and especially Spelunky! I start a fresh game in the Mines, find the Udjat Eye which guides me to the Black Market once I make it to the Jungle where I could buy the Ankh which grants an unheard of second life! I’m a few thousand bucks short for the $50,000 Ankh so I carefully bomb my way around the numerous shopkeepers to get some extra jewels and gold nuggets out of the terrain. The last nugget I need is all the way on the far side of the level and my final bomb sends the shopkeepers on a rampage.

Jumping and blasting like maniacs, branding me a terrorist, they all either kill themselves on the Tiki Trap spikes or bound themselves into a small alcove… where the Ankh is. I carefully run around to the shops to loot the abandoned items and see if the coast is clear and that’s about the time a chill runs up my spine. Oh no, the Ghost is coming! I head back towards the Ankh as he appears right there on the edge of the screen and chuck four bombs into the Enraged Shopkeeper hole. It’s somehow enough to kill them all and I drop in to touch the Ankh as the ghost closes in just pixels away.

I book it back around to the exit, taking a hit from a shopkeeper but somehow avoiding certain death from another. I duck inside the exit and check to make sure “stealing” the Ankh counted for the Achievement. It did! Splendid, now I’ve got two lives and — as soon as my mind starts reeling with the possibilities I’m hit at the next exit by a patrolling shopkeeper which wastes my extra life and killed in a totally forgettable fashion shortly after. That’s how these games go; dizzying, miraculous highs followed almost immediately by crushing lows. But man, I gotta get that high again!

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.