VideoGame I love it, even throughout all of the angry Shopkeeper deaths.
Spelunky has a simple enough concept: enter a cave and get as much loot as you can without dying. That's where simple ends. Pretty soon, you'll have to deal with spiders dropping on your head, spikes just out of sight, shopkeepers armed and dangerous, mummies, and a couple dozen other deadly things.
That's not to say it isn't fun, though. Throughout all the deaths, one must persist, making progress each and every time, until you are capable of getting through the Mines, and then the Jungle, and so on.
One of my first roguelikes, I was hooked on it as soon as I started, even though I couldn't get past the Mines at first. But as I kept playing, I enjoyed it more, found more and more secrets, and eventually filled out the journal.
Learning about all the traps is a requirement if you wish to make progress, unless you want to die to some Tiki Traps a couple dozen times. After you get past dying a bunch, though, the game is very fun and enjoyable. If you can, you should get the remake. Not that Classic is bad, but the remake is better.
"Happy spelunking!" -Yang
VideoGame Warning! No Fun Allowed!
It's honestly impressive to me, how a game series like this ends up being little to no fun, and unlike other intentionally frustrating games like Getting Over It, this game actually has great art, immersive music, a decent story, good characters, and solid controls.
But when it comes to the game itself you have non-intuitive randomly generated dungeons, a multitude of cheap hazards that you often can't see, several One-Hit Kill instances that make you question why you have a health bar at all, and overall a fundamental lack of understanding of what makes a game hard, but fair.
The fact that a completely unrelated creature can wander into a shop, damage the shopkeeper, and then cause him to go after YOU even though you never even made eye contact with the guy before, or how bumping into one enemy can set off a chain reaction of damage that kills you before you can even recover from the overly long stun mechanic it imposes on you, should speak for itself how much the game isn't built for fair challenges.
Overall the game is a gamble. Will you make decent progress into a run? Or will you get screwed over by something you had no full control over? YMMV on the experience you have.