What I'm Playing Now: Spelunky

Boingboing's offworld kept posting about Spelunky, a 2D low-res platform/exploration dungeon crawler, and I just didn't care - it didn't look fun.

But it's free, so I finally gave it a shot, and got hooked. It is surprisingly engaging. Here's why:

Every level is dynamically generated every time, so every game is completely new.

You are given a set of basic actions that can apply to many objects (whip, pick up, throw, drop), an array of interesting tools (rope, bomb at start; cape, teleport are more advanced) as well as some interesting acrobatics that can be augmented by items.

Some hilarious situations can result from experimenting with actions and objects.

Try it out - download for free.