Spelunky 2

Spelunky 2 arrived nine years after the original defined an entire generation of "roguelike-like" platformers, and it does not play it safe. Derek Yu's sequel sends a new cast of explorers to the Moon in search of a missing family member, layering deeper item interactions, new biomes, tamable mounts and a genuine crafting-adjacent depth on top of a formula that many players already considered close to perfect. Critics loved it — a 91 on Metacritic — and the player verdict is almost as lopsided, sitting at Very Positive across more than 14,000 English-language reviews. The interesting part of this game's reception isn't the headline score. It's what the small, vocal minority of dissenters have in common: they are overwhelmingly the people with the most hours in the original.

More game, in almost every direction

The sequel's structural ambition isn't in dispute. New regions branch and interconnect in ways the first game's more linear path didn't, mounts and pets add tactical options mid-run, and returning item interactions from the original are joined by enough new combinations that experienced players are still discovering tech years later. Local co-op, a competitive Arena deathmatch mode and a lightweight ongoing narrative thread give the package more to do outside of solo runs than the original ever offered. None of this is contested in the review corpus — even players who end up disliking the sequel routinely credit it with genuinely expanding the formula rather than just reskinning it.

This matters for how the game should be read against the rest of the genre it helped popularize. Where a lot of post-Spelunky roguelike-platformers lean into meta-progression — permanent upgrades, unlockable starting gear, a ratchet that makes each run a little easier than the last — Spelunky 2 deliberately doesn't. Nothing carries between runs except what you've learned. Several reviewers frame this as the game's biggest single strength relative to its imitators: failure never feels like it's being compensated for with a consolation currency, which is exactly why mastering it feels earned rather than accumulated. It's also exactly why the difficulty conversation below matters more here than it would in a game with an easier safety net.

The fairness debate that only veterans are qualified to have

Where opinion splits is difficulty, and specifically the character of that difficulty. A recurring group of reviewers — several citing 200 or more hours in the original Spelunky or its HD remake as their credential — describe Spelunky 2 as replacing "difficult but fair" with something closer to unfair: enemies and hazards that can stun-lock a character through repeated hits before they regain control, instant deaths from off-screen or barely-visible sources, and level generation that several describe as actively hostile rather than merely challenging. It's worth being precise about the size of this complaint: it is a clear minority relative to the overall Very Positive score, and plenty of equally veteran players defend the harder edge as the point of a sequel. But it recurs specifically and consistently enough — the same handful of mechanical complaints, from players who by their own account are exactly the sequel's target audience — that it reads as a real design disagreement rather than scattered frustration from players who were never going to enjoy a punishing roguelike anyway. Steam's own achievement data is consistent with a genuinely brutal completion curve: the easiest unlock sits at roughly 79% of the playerbase, but that falls away sharply, with the hardest achievements clearing only 2–6%.

A co-op bug that outlived several attempts to fix it

The more clear-cut problem is online co-op. Multiple reviewers spanning 2021 through 2024 report runs getting stuck on a "syncing" screen between levels, sometimes indefinitely, with alt-tabbing in and out of the window as the only unreliable workaround. The timing here matters: this wasn't a launch-day rough edge that got patched away — a later update that added cross-platform multiplayer between PC and console players is what introduced the clock-drift issue in the first place, and years of community discussion afterward converged on a workaround of rolling the game back to an older version rather than waiting on an official fix. For a game whose Arena mode and local co-op are otherwise genuine strengths, a multi-year unresolved bug in its online counterpart is a real mark against it, not a minor footnote.

What that split actually means for a buyer

None of this makes Spelunky 2 a game to avoid — quite the opposite, given how many hundred-plus-hour reviews sit on both sides of the fairness debate. Reviewers who love the game and reviewers who are frustrated by it frequently report near-identical playtimes in the hundreds of hours, which is itself telling: even the dissenters aren't bouncing off the game early, they're engaging with it deeply enough to have a genuinely informed opinion about where its difficulty crosses a line for them. That's a very different shape of complaint than "this game is broken" or "this game is boring," and it's worth reading the negative reviews themselves, not just their star rating, before deciding whether the harder edge sounds like it would bother you specifically.

Final verdict

Spelunky 2 earns its acclaim honestly: it's a bigger, denser, more replayable version of a genre classic, and the vast majority of its very large review base has no serious complaint beyond "it's hard." 7.5 rather than higher reflects two specific, well-corroborated issues rather than general grumbling — a fairness debate among the players most qualified to judge it, and a years-long online co-op sync bug with no clean official fix. Buy it without hesitation for solo play; if you're counting on smooth online co-op, check the current state of that bug first.