Once you get over the learning curve of the controls (it actually feels really good for 85), you'll find an early example of a precision platformer that treats you like an adult, requiring mastery of its (frankly limited) systems to succeed. You'll be repeating the first few screens over and over, but you'll find yourself getting a little bit further with each attempt. Just don't focus on beating it as quickly as possible, a perfect run is only about 20 minutes long. It's truly the Dark Souls of platformers ;)

Seriously, give it a go. A complete run of the first loop will take a while, but it's really not as intimidating as it might initially seem. There's a reason this game has stuck in the minds of Japanese game fans. I would have been all over this if I was a Famicom owner back then.

Review applies to NES Version:
Possibly the most fragile main character in any NES game. He just doesn't even survive a 1 meter drop. The controls are also some of the worst I've seen yall. If you are hanging on a rope you have to perfectly press jump your direction of choice at the very same time. Otherwise he'll just let go of the rope and die in mid air. Bro doesn't even need to touch the floor to take fall damage.

But even though this game is pretty bad I love it very much. The theme music is just a bop and when you collect the hidden items you get some super funky remixes. Sooo coool yeah yeah! It is a short game and in my opinion has enough variety to keep you entertained till the end. Also game overs put you back to the title screen so you can play this as a 1 attempt per day kinda game. Works well enough in that regard.

Also I have no idea why the NES Version and the Arcade Version are the same page. They are completely different games.

this review is messily structured, but i'm too tired to fix it and don't want to have to make a google doc to store it in, so:

it's reputation as a bad game, specifically the fragility of the player character, drew me in.
that fragility encourages intentional gameplay, i think; the traps, also often viewed as unfair, lead you to progress deeper and deeper into the cave each time, as you memorize and refine your route.
while the game is still flawed, seeing it in that way made the flaws forgivable, and gave me a new perspective on game design/playing (i mean, wow, that idea of 'progressing deeper each time' is how most older games work, just not contextualized as clearly as spelunker's cave!)
pretty important note!: i haven't even completed this game yet, so maybe there is some outright stupid stuff later on, i dunno.
also: the c64 version seems pretty cool too, i should check it out (like i think it has title cards for different areas?!)

Spelunker suffers from an abysmal reputation in the community: like all urban legends, it is certainly somewhat exaggerated, but some truth remains. The title is liberally inspired by Lode Runner (1983), if only in the exploration of an underground cavern and the collection of items needed to progress – in this case, keys. Let me quote Cassidy's very informative post (Bad Game Hall of Fame), which I highly recommend reading: Spelunker creator Timothy G. Martin began work on the title after many setbacks in the industry, buffeted by the crash of 1983. The aim would have been to express Martin's love of cave exploration – not unlike Shigeru Miyamoto for The Legend of Zelda... – while taking inspiration from Henry Levin's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). The port was supervised by Brøderbund, then commercially in vogue.

The title features the Spelunker, whose goal is to descend into the bowels of the earth to reach a pyramid that is obviously similar to Atlantis. The player must collect keys that open the various doors blocking the way out, while managing their energy, which serves as both a timer and a resource to get rid of the occasional ghosts. What makes Spelunker so special is the unforgiving aspect of its gameplay: the slightest fall is deadly and jumps are easily missed, especially when the character is on a ladder or a rope. Indeed, it is not possible to hook onto an adjacent platform, as the title requires the player jump on it (meaning that a direction has to be pressed). However, it is easy to press a direction for a few frames too long, causing the character to fall off the rope or ladder before a jump, resulting in a wrongful death. It is this ruthlessness that the game is known for: personally, while I found the title unfair, it does not have the worst controls imaginable. It is, however, still horribly rough, and I can only agree with the Bad Game Hall of Fame article: while the development team justified its difficulty by pointing to the need to distance itself from the more generous and friendly Super Mario Bros. (1983) that happened to be released at the same time, Cassidy argues that this is a later explanation, presumably invented to make up for the studio's general incompetence.

I would tend to agree, as there is no justification for Spelunker's punishing mechanics: falls are very easily seen as fatal by the game and the level design does not reflect the claustrophobic feel Martin wanted to create. If the inspiration is indeed Journey to the Center of the Earth, there is none of the diversity of the film's settings, or even its mysteriousness. The sense of danger only comes from the poor controls and never from elements specifically designed to create an immersive tension. Enemies are never a problem – their speed increases marginally as the loops go on, but it doesn't change anything – and items don't create any challenge. Bombs are used to destroy a few rare rocks, while flares are used to get rid of bats, which are never useful anyway – from the fourth loop onwards, they're also used to collect the keys. Unlike a title like Metroid, which has a similar psychological idea, Spelunker never manages to create anxiety through resource management.

The title nevertheless compensates with a rather organic level design, with a good balance between linearity and exploration, for a game of its time. When the player finishes the game the first time, the loops bring additional conditions, notably the keys now being invisible. Such a choice does not encourage a scoring logic, but rather a speedrunning approach and rote learning the location of the keys is indeed quite easy. It is regrettable that the scenery always remains the same. If a few gimmicks punctuate the levels (the lift and the mine car in the first one; the waterfall in the third one, which reminds of the underground ocean of Journey to the Center of the Earth), they remain too rare to be really effective. Spelunker appears to be a contradictory title; rather ahead of its time in some respects, it suffers from amateurish and decidedly poor controls. Perhaps most frustrating are the after-the-fact justifications, which seem rather dishonest – or, if they are true, terribly naive. If it's not the worst game on the NES, as some would like to call it, Spelunker is still a very mediocre title. Incidentally, as Cassidy elaborates, it has had a lasting influence on Japanese video games. There's probably a lesson to be learnt here.

Man versus the ghosts that haunt him, venturing into the darkest depths of the cavern, the mineshaft, in a perennial search for gold - the perfection of the mental, physical and spiritual. The burden placed upon him crushes his bones from the slightest elevation, his life hanging by (or quite literally on) a thread, ready to end with the slightest input mistake at any moment's notice. He may not even know that he can use flares to temporarily take out bats and end up trapped forever in an awkward poop cycle, desperately awaiting an opportunity before his declining oxygen levels spell out his demise. He may not know, but it doesn't matter, because he is giving it his best. And that's all you can do. The NES version of this game is a trial by fire, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Will you succeed, or will you perish?

Also the cart has a cute red LED on it that glows when the game is running!

delightful little platformer. fairly difficult and very meticulously methodical, any and all carelessness tends to result in immediate death. it's also very short with only four stages, that loop with somewhat increased difficulty.

you definitely need a certain mindset to appreciate it. I think mainly an ability to take the ways you die with a sense of humor. I get that a lot of people get pissed off playing this but this isn't something lol random in the way of something like IWBTG where suddenly something flies in from offscreen and murders you. when you die, it is entirely because you fucked up, you got careless and walked over a ledge, or climbed little bit too far down a rope while precariously setting up a jump, all things within your control. dying becomes this kinda bumbling slapstick, and you may have to be able to laugh at yourself to not get ticked off by that.