Spelunker Party!

I'm not usually the guy reviewing 2D platformers, but Spelunker Party! kept showing up in co-op recommendation threads for a reason, so I put some hours in. The pitch is simple and brutal: your character, a fragile cave explorer who has been the long-running joke of Japanese gaming culture since the NES era, dies from falling tiny heights, runs out of oxygen, gets spooked by bat droppings, and generally fails at staying alive in ways that feel almost comedic. That's not a bug. That deliberate fragility is the entire design philosophy, ported forward from an Atari-era original and kept fully intact here. The structure is a 100-plus stage cave platformer spread across multiple worlds, playable solo or with up to three others in local or online co-op. Tools available to you are modest but functional: bombs to clear boulders, flares to scatter bats, a portable fan to push away ghosts, and the ability to climb ropes. Jumps are fixed-arc, meaning you commit to a distance when you leave the ground and mid-air corrections don't exist. That mechanic divides players cleanly. If you respect it and play slow, the level design is fair and the death count stays manageable. If you treat it like a modern platformer with responsive air control, you will die constantly and angrily. The game rewards caution and punishes impatience, and it does not apologize for that at all. Progression runs through Litho-orbs collected across stages, which you assemble into gear pieces occupying four equipment slots. Gear levels up with use, offering things like reduced air consumption, larger bomb blast radius, or protection from specific hazards. You can also bring a pet companion that has active abilities, including digging up hidden treasure or reviving downed teammates. The co-op design is tightly woven into this: certain secrets require switch coordination between players, some paths are gated to multiplayer only, and the game grants more gear experience and gold the more players you bring. The online co-op also uses a split-screen view even when playing remotely, which sounds odd but actually makes sense given how often players end up in separate sections of a cave simultaneously. Here's the honest problem though: the solo experience is noticeably worse. The quest system forces you to manually activate one objective at a time from a list, objectives like kill five ghosts or blow up three walls, and the game offers no indication of which levels contain what you need without prior knowledge. You finish a level and the quest doesn't count because the right enemy type wasn't present. The free-to-play DNA of Spelunker World, the PS4 title this is reworked from, still shows in the progression pacing. The microtransactions are gone, but the grind structure that supported them is still there underneath. Online lobbies are also quiet, which means finding random strangers to play with is unreliable. Local co-op is the more consistent path. For a shooter specialist like me, there's no netcode to stress-test here and the skill ceiling is more about patience than precision. What I can tell you is that the moment you get three people on a couch or a voice call running through a cave, the comedy of simultaneous deaths and the coordination required for switch puzzles produces a genuinely entertaining loop. The Steam user base, while small, rates it positively. The audience who bounces off it hard are solo players and anyone who wants fluid, responsive movement. Accept the constraints and the 100-plus stages offer real volume.

Fred · Scout Team

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