We have to talk about the Spelunky 2 art style...

[PsychoDino]

The first trailer is out, and oh man..............the game looks terrible. Colors seemed washed out, backrounds are flat, and the entire game looks blotchy. I just cannot wrap my mind around how bad the sequel looks, am i the only one?

[the.goosh222]

1. Early build.
2. I think this is a Nidhogg 2 situation. It's a graphical style that is confusing and contrasting to what worked before. It's polarizing. Mostly importantly, it will grow on you, and you'll learn to love it.
Or, you won't. You'll be the diehard fan who hates the new game for not staying faithful to the original style. And you know what? There's no shame in that. But for most people, it's an issue that the gameplay will fix. No reason to hate you, though.
However, that's just my take on it. Maybe there will be a Spelunky HD graphics mod like the Spelunky Classic mod for HD.

[veselatorba]

You're not the only one. I really hope it's just "work in progress" and the final version will look better.

[Necrius]

Pretty awful indeed. The original doesn't pretend to be serious, but Spelunky 2 looks like a mean parody.

[Lunatix]

That is the first thing than i thought, art style looks bad compared to the first.

[Josef]

Derek on twitter had this to say: "To me it's actually less plain, but the details are definitely more subtle and harder to catch at a glimpse. My main goal is to use strong, pop-out details purposefully instead of just everywhere, if that makes sense! Each area will hopefully feel much more distinct, too. Still, I'm reading feedback and always take it into consideration! These trailers are more than marketing for me. Gotta let feedback gestate, though - the first Spelunky 1 trailer was a shock to people, too. :)"

I for one find the new art style to be incredibly crisp. Especially with some of the stills released alongside the interview with Derek.

[Ｂｏｏｂｓ]

i don't like the 3d-ish feeling of it :( (including the lava physic)

[QcChopper]

Well F me but I actually like it.

[Almea]

I like some of it like the underwater area and forest

But the "mines" area doesn't look good to me

[Delthea]

Seems fine to me. Nobody played Spelunky for the 1080p photo-realistic graphics anyways.

[Urapa]

Автор сообщения: Delthea

Seems fine to me. Nobody played Spelunky for the 1080p photo-realistic graphics anyways.

That's not the point at all.

[RalDawg]

looks aight

[Ace Detective]

I like how it looks! Very refreshing! Even if you've played hunrends of hours in the first game your eyes won't ask for something new when dealing with the second one. They've managed to save the original art style yet making it new and fresh

[chmbr]

A few of the tiles were pretty bad (the "cave" tiles being just simple zig-zags) but the rest look great to me. I bet the bland tiles are placeholders, though.

[The Official Consistency]

It looks different, but Ill get used to it within 2 or 3 hours I bet.

[SophieBaybey]

I'm definitely with you on the art style looking bland. I think it gives me the same feeling as when you download HD graphical mods for old games, like the original Deus Ex or System Shock 2, in that everything technically is very high quality, but it just seems out of place and bland. Out of the 5 minute gameplay demo that was released, I'm gonna make a pros and cons list for everything that sticks out to me.

PROS
Visual Fidelity. It's very easy to see what is where, and in the heat of movement, that is important. It could be argued that the original spelunky had a more cluttered artstyle which may have had newcomers miss important details. I mean, I would be lying if I said I always see every item hidden inside walls (just yesterday I was playing and my friend pointed out a machete in the mines that I had completely missed.) That being said, it could be argued that that is a positive aspect as it rewards watchful players, but I digress. It is without a doubt easier to parse information

Unique Tile Art. I didn't know what to call this, but essentially what I mean is the tiles that aren't part of base level generation look really great. This means things like Idol traps, the tents in the background where cavemen are around, platforms where tiki men stand, ropes, ladders, the blocks made out of bones, level entry/exit doors, it all looks really great. There's also multiple sprites that appear for pots, which adds a nice bit of variety.

CONS
Tilesets. In the mines section of the game, the blocks are literally just zigzags. It's pretty bad. Compare that to Spelunky 1's pieces of rocks and fossils all coming together, with a background that is similar but different enough that it makes it really look like you're in a cave. The new artstyle, in my opinion, seems to have much less pronounced and darker backgrounds, which makes the levels seem more like they were made to be compatible with a level editor or something. Pushable blocks, for example, while distinct in the first game, just look smooth as paper in this one. Sure, you can see it easier, but it's really quite jarring to look at. The smoother tiles also make the randomly generated foreground stuff a lot more obvious. For example, in the mines for both Spelunky 1 and 2, fossils are occasionally in the dirt. You almost never notice it in Spelunky 1, but it adds to the overall feel and design. In spelunky 2, you can see it so distinctly, that the random terrain generator begins to show its faults in particular areas. If you look at the gameplay demo that came out, there's a part where two of these fossils spawned right next to each other, and it looks REALLY bad and out of place.

Animation. Most of the animation is fine or on-par with the first game, but the ladder climbing animation is... really bad. Liquid physics, while cool, also looks a bit weird. I think it's mostly because it looks more like jello than liquid, and it's all one flat color for the most part. Water looks better than lava, though.

Fonts. Okay, I'm sure this is going to get changed, but the font in the journal is so bland it's insulting. It literally looks like the first option they chose in Photoshop, it's really really bad. I'm almost certain it's going to be changed before release though, because it's a minor detail.

Colors. The entire mines section looks bland, and from what I've seen, the other areas don't fare much better. It's just very... grey. Spelunky 1 has very bright colours in all of its areas, even the temple has dark blacks to contrast with the lighter greys, whereas spelunky 2 seems to have very few true black colors, and so none of the other colors really pop out.

Character Design. This has always been a contentious point for myself in Spelunky, but i think Derek Yu overdesigns his characters a bit. The playable characters are very heavily shaded and have a ton of detail, and the same goes with enemies. Looking at the cavemen, for example, in both Spelunky 1 and 2 I find them to be a little weird to look at (the full head of hair looks like a skimask in S1) but I find that Spelunky 2 suffers worse from this problem. The snakes look like they were made in Flash. I really don't like it.


Now, with all this being said, keep in mind that I adore Spelunky 1 and Derek Yu's work, and despite my (many) problems with the art style, I still think that gameplay wise this game is going to be off the charts. I can't help but hope that the community mods in some tilesets reminiscent of the first game, though, because I can't get into this art.

To those saying "it's different, but you just have to get used to it," I don't think it's quite that simple. I've poured over gameplay of this game, everything I can get my hands on, and something feels off about how it looks the whole way through. I can get behind a funky art style, but not if that art style looks like an HD Minecraft texture pack.

EDIT: I didn't really talk about the volcano level, but I think it looks quite a bit better. The issue with the random generation rears its head again though, as there is an artpiece of a gash in the stone that appears 6 times in one area, layered on top of itself, and it just looks horrendous. Overall, though, the darker backgrounds lend themselves nicely to the volcano level, and I think it looks like an upgrade.