I Beat Tiamat Tonight

16 Feb 2022

This post will contain spoilers for Spelunky 2, because I just beat the first ending. And that’s the first spoiler, there are multiple endings. There will be more, right after this paragraph.

I beat Tiamat for the first time tonight.

I’ve actually beaten Kingu already, so this isn’t the first ending I’ve gotten. That run was heavily coached by my then-eleven-year-old son although I did do the actual defeating by myself.

I’ve been playing Spelunky 2 regularly since it came out, though both of my kids got heavily into it well before I got truly sucked in to it. They two of them beat it together on the eldest’s account first, and then he refused to help the youngest in the same fashion on his account. Kind of a jerk move, eldest.

Youngest responded in the way youngests sometimes do: He got really fucking good at the game. Cosmic Ocean become a Constellation good. I’m probably better than eldest at the game at this point, but still nowhere near youngest’s skill.

I reached this point on the XBox version of the game. As previously posted here - I’m pretty sure, I didn’t actually verify - I got an XBox S after the PS4’s hard drive died in December. I have notions of replacing the drive but I’m not terribly certain I want to bother. There was a break for a while as the game wasn’t released on XBox until January 13th.

I’ve been playing pretty regularly since then, 2-3 runs a day typically. A few more some days, and none at all on others. It took a long time for me to defeat Olmec again, that only happened within the past week.

This was a very good run. I had an abundance of bombs through much of it, there was a clean drill to Vlaad’s and there was an easy alter on that same level so I got the Kapala quickly as well. I got Excalibur, won glue from the Dice House and mostly bombed my way through Neo Babylon.

I got Tiamat a couple of times with Excalibur I am pretty sure, then dropped it while teetering over the edge of a bubble. It took me a few bombs to realize that she was roaring them away. I don’t think I ever noticed that - for a while we were watching Twiggle regularly, and I remember seeing her roar but I didn’t understand everything that was happening. Also, Twiggle very rarely doesn’t cook his bombs properly.

So I started cooking them too, and a couple explosions later and there I was, not disappointing her. I played as Anna Spelunky, who is the only character I’ve played as thus far except for those times when I was passing the controller back and forth with Jon, who typically chose Roffy at that time. I was lawful, a queen, took my first damage on 1-3 which is pretty good, and survived death once.

I pilfered 257,725 (which is a paltry sum compared to what’s possible, I guess perhaps some gold and speed runs are in my future) and the run time was 00:25:16.766. Perhaps I will sort out how to embed a picture here: