Spelunky 2 got shadow-dropped on PS5, now runs at 120 fps

Spelunky 2, the super challenging and mega clever roguelike 2D platformer, first came out on PlayStation 4 in 2020 and was therefore is also playable as a backwards compatible game on the PlayStation 5. But on Thursday, the game suddenly got an official PS5 version, which can be downloaded as a free upgrade to anybody who already owns the PS4 version of the game.

The important part of this news is that now Spelunky 2 runs at a whopping 120 frames per second. That’s assuming, of course, that you have your PS5 plugged into a television or monitor that can display all of those frames — and if you don’t, consider getting an upgrade, because for a game like this, it’s worth seeing every single frame you can get.

Take it from me, a person who first played Hollow Knight on the Nintendo Switch in handheld mode and ultimately decided that I should buy it again on PC just so I could benefit from using a far better monitor for its super-precise combat. In just the same way, the pixel-perfect moves you need to pull off in Spelunky and Spelunky 2 benefit from the best possible screen and fps. Then again, if you don’t have those things, you can just blame that as the reason why the game is so darn hard.

If you’ve never played Spelunky 2 in the first place and you love a 2D platforming challenge, don’t miss it — but be prepared to learn the importance of patience. Here’s how it’s described in our review of the game, written by Polygon editor-in-chief Chris Plante: “The goal of Spelunky isn’t to beat the game, anyway. The goal is to understand its world. You discover how to use everything in the room and, in turn, how to survive it. Each session ideally lasts a little longer than the last. Five minutes. Six minutes. Then 15 minutes. You make progress, die, lose every upgrade and item, then restart with nothing more than what you learned along the way.”