In "Spelunky," if you spend a little too much time on a certain level, a nearly invincible ghost may appear and chase you slowly to the exit while insta-killing you.

Such is the case in the dungeon-exploring roguelike Lucky Tower Ultimate. Moreover, he is neither slow nor subtle; he sprints toward you, screaming at the top of his lungs. He also doesn't wait too long for you to level up: I once got hit with a hammer as soon as I opened the door to his room.

Getting splattered with paste the moment you set foot on the level doesn't feel as fair as being haunted for being so blatantly lazy, but it's 100% fine that Lucky Tower Ultimate is unfair. Dying almost every time is really funny and makes starting over less grueling; dying in Spelunky can make me angry, but here I almost always get a chuckle out of it. By the way, the game is not yet available: it is scheduled to be released in August. But Steam has a demo that you can play starting today, and it's a great way to spend the weekend.

Some of you may remember Lucky Tower from when it was a Flash game series, but if not, you start at the top of a random tower with just a pair of pants and a nice haircut. As you drop down the levels, you'll find three doors. There are monsters, traps, giant blue demons who want to play shell games with human teeth, you name it.

As you go deeper into the tower and get closer to freedom, you will find weapons, equipment, potions and power-ups. Sometimes you can even let them solve the next riddle and see what happens. Often they die badly! Most of the time, you will too.

The awkwardness of Lucky Tower Ultimate is part of its charm. Since you only have two hands for inventory (sometimes you can find a small bag of coins, but that's it), you have to constantly juggle weapons and other items, leaving most of what you find behind. With only two slots for equipment, desperate situations abound, resulting in no small amount of comedy as you drop things when you intend to throw them, drop things when you intend to drop them, and sometimes eat things when you intend to do something else. I've eaten a lot of dead frogs, dead rats, goblin eyeballs, and once accidentally threw a corpse at a neutral creature I was trying to talk to. Spelunky is not the only game in which short-tempered shopkeepers appear.

There are also the occasional odd wizard to encounter. They drop usable weapons and items and give us quests. Sometimes he is super fast, other times he dies instantly. Frankly, he is tough.

But in "Lucky Tower Ultimate," everything is tough. Perhaps the goal is not to escape, but to enjoy dying quickly and violently. Because when I opened the first door, a naked blue man hit me with a hammer.