I’ve never seen a yeti with a jet-pack,
I do not think I’ll see one.
But, barring some financial setback,
I’d really like to be one.

– Dirk

You want to win at Spelunky. You may not know you want to win at Spelunky yet, but you will. A great many people don’t know they want to win at Spelunky, but they should.

Here’s how.

Develop Situational Awareness

This is the phrase fighter pilots use to describe the uncanny sense that a) someone is about to kill you b) there is someone nearby that would like to kill you, but hasn’t lined you up in their sights yet. Your job, whether you are flying a stealth bomber or playing Spelunky, is to kill things in category A before they kill you, and make sure category B things never turn into category A. Spelunky loves to punish the oblivious. The arrow traps in the first area announce this right from the start. They’re the same color as innocently pushable blocks, but their texture is obviously different — obvious, anyway, to anyone who stops for a second and pays attention. But there are times when you’ll have to rush through a level, and then you’ll need that uncanny sense. You need know something’s wrong a half-second before you consciously realize it. I have no idea how you learn this skill. I think mainly you do it by dying a lot. Luckily, the arrows only eat two hearts, so you get to learn this lesson twice before you have to start over.

Below is a real screenshot from the very start of the game. Can you identify all the potential dangers visible already? Roll over the screenshot to see them circled.

“Don’t be afraid to die! But also don’t be afraid to live!” the download page advises. It is reminiscent of Bibi Dahl, the girl James Bond found too innocent to bed in For Your Eyes Only, calling out to Bond right before she disappeared forever: “Goodbye but not farewell!” Too syrupy to be believed, but it actually is a succinct restatement of the two axioms of Spelunky. First: ignorance leads to death. You need to know how enemies move, you need to know exactly how far you can fall without taking damage, and you need to know that the bow is the worst weapon in the game. Without these facts and three thousand others, you’re reacting mostly on instinct, which is exciting for perhaps thirty seconds, and then you die. Second: experimentation leads to death. The teleporter shoots you into a wall, the jar cracks open to throw a spider in your face when you only have one heart left, or the psychic blasts from the giant alien knock you into a deep dark hole.

Video games teach us to hate death. Hell, every breath we take in the waking world teaches us to hate death. You have to turn this oppressive survival instinct off when you play Spelunky. Each time you die, you want to do it in a way that teaches you something. You could even sit back when the high scores come up to think it over. I’m sure some terribly earnest nerds do this, in fact. I bet a few even keep a journal on their computer, spelunky.txt, with little ASCII bar charts measuring their most common causes of death. I bet one of them will land on the Reddit front page someday as a result of these antics. I hope you will have the wisdom to downvote them, because games aren’t for bookkeepers.

My suggestion on what to do when you die: rock back in your chair. Raise your hands up into the air, as far as you can get them from the keyboard, as if to say: “I didn’t do that.” Reflect on how you still haven’t made any more progress on those unlockables. Ragequitting the game is okay but only if you don’t ever let the word ‘ragequit’ take shape in your mind. You must keep the 4chan impulse in check. Take a little time to think about doing something productive, then re-open the game. Regain your inner fu. Take a timeout once you’re back in and listen to that level music. It’s actually quite good when you’re not stressed out. I particularly like the second area’s music — ironically, my least favorite part of the game. Those frogs always jump high when you want them to go low.

(The third, secret axiom, by the way: knowledge often leads to death anyway. So don’t feel too bad about consulting the wiki about what it was that just killed you.)

Always Die Empty-Handed

You get four bombs and four ropes to start off with. Bombs are fun and ropes bail you out when you’re trapped. In either case, you’ll feel a great compulsion to hold onto these until they’re really important. This is an excellent compulsion to have. It will serve you well both in Spelunky and any apocalypses you may experience in life. But there’s an important and surprisingly nonobvious corollary: being alive is always better than being dead. If you’ve only got one heart left, it’s time to start burning items to avoid situations where a false move would kill you. Sure, you almost certainly could whip that spider in time. But why not just bomb your way around it? Those three bombs aren’t going to do much good for your dead Spelunker. He will not find much comfort in them when he’s chilling up in the Pearly Gates hidden level.

I try to measure the state of my Spelunking affairs in four ways: being rich in hearts, being rich in ropes and bombs, being rich in items, and being rich in gold bricks. That last one is the worst place to be in the game. Gold doesn’t do anything but make you richer in any of the other three ways, and it can be tricky to convert between them. Fortunately, Spelunky has no inventory system, so there is no penalty for carrying around $300,000 worth of uselessness.

Ask, What Would John Galt Do?

You constantly trade risk for reward in Spelunky. In order to come out on the winning side of this trade, you have to develop a sense of rational self-interest. At first, this is obvious. Don’t go for the single gold brick underneath the giant spider. Take it easy around spikes. But as you progress through its levels, Spelunky will offer you more complex choices. Do you keep your pistol or the $10,000 idol? Or instead, use a bomb to open a new path that will allow you to avoid the choice entirely? Will you kill the shopkeeper with the shotgun he lets you pick up to inspect in his shop, and take everything he has for sale for free? Will you rescue the damsel and earn an extra heart at the level’s end, or will you sacrifice her to the fell goddess Kali, who after enough sacrifices (damsels or enemies, she doesn’t understand the concept of friend or foe), grants you the ability to drink your enemies’ blood in order to gain life?

The beauty of the game is that you almost always have time to think carefully about these choices. Almost all the enemies start off inactive, so you can choose how to approach them. You will develop your own sense of ethics, especially about the damsels and Kali. They are two sides of the same coin, after all. One dumber than dirt, another unspeakably wise. I started off always favoring the damsels. An extra chance to make a mistake seemed priceless. But after spending one game sucking life from blood… it is more tempting than can be told in words, the dark side.

The Collapsing Ledges in Area 3 Are Your Friend

Think of them of parachutes. Just like in cartoons, as long as you jump off before you hit the ground, you won’t get hurt all. So long as there is ground waiting for you at the bottom, of course. It may be helpful to compose your own prayer for this purpose. May I recommend this article’s epigraph as a starting point?