Somehow this
great thing has gone almost completely under Bay12's radar, and under radars in general. It's been Greenlit, but aside from a laudatory
RPS article it's gotten almost no publicity that I've seen. I don't know why, it's great.
Reverse Spelunky is a good way to describe the gameplay, you're a dude and you have to climb an impossibly tall procedurally-generated tower filled with increasingly strange hazards as you ascend to the heavens. Like spelunky, the game progresses in floors and every few floors you reach a new environment with new hazards. Unlike spelunky, there's no health. You get a single revive at the start of the game, and you can buy more but they're expensive and only work if your body lands somewhere survivable (so if you fall into lava or somehow manage to fall
out of the tower, your revive doesn't work). There's all kinds of special events and strangeness too, and I'll do my best not to spoil any of it.
The atmosphere is great, with a sort of minimalist storytelling that reminds me of Dark Souls or Shadow of the Colossus. Each guy has a name and a different colored shirt, and when you die it shows a little picture of your dude's fate, which is a nice touch.
It's also very, very hard. If you die, it's always because you made some kind of mistake. And you die a lot. So far I've only made it a few levels into the second zone, about 700 feet up.
Does anybody else have this? You can get it for five bucks currently, and the final price will apparently be ten. Unfortunately for you yohoho types (or perhaps fortunately for the dev), the game's obscurity has left it uncracked, as far as I can tell. You'll have to pay if you want to play. It's worth five bucks.
Let's hear your stories! Anything exciting happen to you?
Oh, and a tip: The mechanics as far as items are kind of opaque. The dark red berries work like corrode pots but without destroying terrain. The orange berries that look like corrode pots are actually "gold berries" and used to buy potions from the witch.