The pause screen's hidden keys

Verified against the spelunky.ai port v0.1.13 on 28 October 2026.

The pause screen lists three keys at the bottom: ESC-RETURN, F1-DIE and F10-QUIT. With a gamepad on, it lists the buttons instead: START-RETURN, BOMB-DIE and ROPE-QUIT. But the keyboard's bomb and rope keys work too, whichever is shown, so a player who presses the bomb key while paused dies, and one who presses the rope key quits the game.

The player pauses the game on the first level. The screen shows ESC-RETURN, F1-DIE and F10-QUIT, but he presses the bomb key, A, and that kills him: the game resumes with him flung into the air, dead, and the game over screen follows ^[1].

The pause screen's code checks for the bomb and rope buttons with checkBombPressed and checkRopePressed:

if (checkBombPressed())
{
    if (paused and global.plife > 0 and isLevel())
    {

Those are the same checks the player's own step uses to throw a bomb or a rope, so they take the gamepad's button or the keyboard's key, whichever is pressed ^{[2] [3]}. The bomb's branch then kills the player as F1 does, and the rope's, with the game paused anywhere, ends the game ^{[4] [5]}. The two deaths differ only in the music: F1 sets it to full volume and stops it ^[6], while the bomb's branch sets it back to the settings' music volume and stops it only if the player has no Ankh.

Pause in a level and press the bomb key, or pause anywhere and press the rope key. The replay of the clip pauses on the first level (frame 1250) and presses A: the player dies (1280), and the game over screen follows ^[7]. Another replay quits from the pause screen with S ^[8].

The spelunky.ai port reproduces it exactly: it's in docs/quirks.md's list of the 1.1 source's bugs ^[5], and the oracle's fingerprints of the replays pin both keys. No option turns it off.