Highly polished, evocative, and fun to play game about drift racing. They really nail the aesthetic with a blend of 80s synth music, vibrant pixel art esq graphics, and impressively specific character tropes that are a delight to interact with on the road.

Spelunky is a roguelike platformer that you should consider playing because it is an important, acclaimed, extremely replayable, and frankly transformative game experience. It is historically important to games as it serves to bridge the gap between classic roguelikes and platformers, a mix that, before Spelunky, was not very explored. Its creation helped prompt a new way of looking at roguelikes/roguelites going forward and continues to be a landmark game today. It has an incredible way of systemically creating interesting stories that you as the player get to play through and react to. If you seek to master games, the process of learning how to play Spelunky will teach you how to manage yourself in its space and in so doing teach you small life skills, like self control and patience.
Spelunky is a game belonging to the roguelike and platforming genres. Your moment to moment gameplay in this game will include a lot of deciding how and when to traverse the randomly generated spaces. This game is particularly approachable because of its platformer roots, but what really makes it special are its roguelike aspects that modify the platforming and create a gameplay experience that is out of the ordinary. The most simple definition of roguelike is that a roguelike game is a game that is like Rogue, a culturally significant game made in 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman. The current definition of Roguelike (and similarly "Roguelite") are still debatable today, but I personally like Derek Yu's (the lead designer of Spelunky) take on it: “I focused on just three attributes of roguelikes that to me held the essence of the genre: 1. Randomized level generation 2. Permanent death (also known as "permadeath"), whereby the player has one life and cannot reload their game to take back mistakes. 3. A ruleset for physical interactions that is shared by the player, non-player characters (NPCs), and items"(Yu, 2016, p.5). By focusing on these aspects of what it means to be a roguelike, Yu distilled roguelikes down to a few simple design rules that allowed him to create a roguelike type of experience while avoiding the complexity that surrounds much of the genre. As such, this game looks and plays primarily as a platformer, with major twists from being a roguelike.
As one plays this game, players come to realize how game changing the permadeath element is to the entire experience. Permadeath ensures that no game impacting game elements are carried over beyond death, so if a player dies they are back at square one again. This constant resetting to having nothing initially makes for an acutely frustrating experience for new players. I would argue that Spelunky often frustrates new players because it belongs to the platformer genre without tracking player progress in the same way as other platformer games, which sets players up to have inherent expectations about Spelunky that will not be met. Generally speaking, platformers tend to offer measurements of progress in the form of scores, player character upgrades, and with checkpoints that anchor progress to at least a certain amount. However, due to permadeath, Spelunky cannot and does not offer any permanent or player character measured metrics like those. Permadeath and random levels dictate that level knowledge and upgrades to a player character are to be lost upon death, but improvements in the player's mental game model (like a player understanding a mechanic or an enemy) can never be taken away. All true progress in Spelunky lies with the player as a measure of what they have learned, and Spelunky's core gameplay rewards this progress by acknowledging and pointing it out to the player. Simply making it further in the game is a testament to the player learning and improving themselves. Measuring progressing by getting to new depths feels rewarding because a player can take solace in the fact that their own skill took them there and that they are currently doing better than they ever have before. Also, the fact that there are new zones every few levels further punctuates moments of major progress; seeing a change of scenery and new enemies indicates that you have notable mastery over the previous zone. Furthermore, by gating new content behind tests of skill (any given level) and endurance (multiple levels), experiencing more of the game becomes its own reward to players. The one small but crucial rule of permadeath directly leads to a powerful play experience where players' progress is rewarded in a very personal and intrinsic way that other games cannot offer.
While Spelunky may be all about learning and figuring things out yourself, you are not alone in the effort to figure out the game. The game's systems themselves are set up to teach in an abstract sandbox teacher sort of way. Because a fatal mistake is somewhat easy to make and the player is expected to fail many times as they are learning, deaths in and of themselves highlight learning opportunities. In this way, the game course corrects player playstyles to fit what works for the game. For instance, if a player rushes too quickly through a level without being prepared or controlled, they will quickly find death greeting them. The game systems teach the player that patience and planning are closer to the ideal way to play, as they do not lead as often to death. Whether it be about learning how to manage resources, how to read the level, predict enemies, or more, the fact that the game can quickly and gently punish mistakes with a death and a reset allows the game to organically teach the player at their own pace.
The last thing to mention about this game is its potential for generating interesting stories. The game is randomly generated upon each start, so there is no detailed overarching narrative going on. However, what does exist is something a little more personalized. Because each level is randomly generated and levels tend to be interesting, often times players will experience moments so fantastic or unlikely that they feel scripted and even intended. Stories like that are what lie at the heart of playing Spelunky, as the game is constantly creating little interaction based stories all the time. There is a large potential in this game to get into tricky situations and you get to experience the joy and confusion of puzzling your own way through.
In conclusion, Spelunky is a unique game that has a lot to offer. If you are looking for a game to delve into mechanically, you will find Spelunky is an abyss of myriad traps and secrets. It's random level generation and permadeath will ensure you have eternally new ground to cover and challenges to face while also subtly teaching you. If you want to get a taste of roguelikes or just want a potent new blend of platformer this game has a lot to offer through its careful design, and if you want to play through story-like encounters while delving through parts unknown this game has many memorable moments to offer.

Quotes sourced from
Yu, Derek. (2016) Spelunky. Los Angeles, CA: Boss Fight Books.

Its a very very polished and downright stunning platformer. The jumping is tight, the added mechanics are a joy to find and use and its just a great experience.

This game's fun sometimes