You take on the role of a university student named Saeed, who despite having exemplary poker playing prowess ends up losing big money in a game. To earn the money to repay your debt, you offer to recover an artifact known as the Golden Skull for one of your professors. Along the way you must collect golden coins for your guide, who apparently also hit a lull in his income earning potential.

In order to recover the skull, you must traverse many ruins, collecting jewels and coins along the way. Each ruin is initially filled with jewels, and to collect them you must click on groups of two or more like jewels that are adjacent to each other. As you collect jewels they will disappear from the screen, and when you’ve cleared all the jewels from the top row more jewels will fall from the ceiling to replace some of the missing treasures. You get points for collecting jewels, and the more jewels you can remove at one time, the more points per jewel you get. After you’ve earned a certain number of points you are eligible to receive a coin. However, the coin will arrive on the screen in place of one of the jewels, so you won’t actually get the coin until you remove all jewels from the top row of the screen. Once a coin is on the screen you collect it by tapping on it.

As you can tell, the mechanics of the game are pretty simple. However, it is by no means a simple game. For the first couple of levels you do have the luxury of pretty much clicking whichever groups of jewels you want. Very rarely do you get yourself into a situation where there are no moves left. Before long, however, you start seeing fewer clumps of similar jewels, and you have to start strategizing as to how you can get the jewels to fall in such a way to build the adjacent groups that you need. I’ve found the turning point to be level 4. Only once have I made it to level 5, and I didn’t pass that level the one time I got there.

Personally, I felt that the difficulty ramped up too quickly. Assuming the location map is any indication, I would guess the accelerated challenge is due to the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of levels to the game. I’d rather see more levels with a more gradual increase in difficulty. This ties into my next gripe, which is the old rogue-like mentality of “saving until you die”. While you’re playing a game, you can exit and come back to pick up on the last level you played. Once you die, however, the save game goes away. After a while, I really don’t feel like playing the first three or four levels again. Also, while I admire the additional features like continually repopulating jewels and coin collection, they should have done more with it. Maybe throw in a couple of special jewels, both for good and bad purposes. Even the story aspect could have been fleshed out more. Once you get past the initial dialog with your guide, all he ever seems to say is “good job, on to the next place”. It would have been neat to have a little background on each location and what it means to the journey, and maybe even tie in some of those missing special items to the story.

Graphically, the game looks pretty sharp. The renders of you and your guide are well done, which is why it would have been nice to see more of them. While there aren’t any real splashy effects, the jewels falling away and your score floating up look pretty nice. The sound effects are decent, but like most puzzle games can get a bit grating after some time. And the music… isn’t there. This game has the perfect backdrop for some exotic music, and in general it’s nice to have some noise on slower paced games.

There’s a lot of promise to Golden Skull. It’s always a joy to see a developer take a proven concept and expand upon it. The “plot” behind the game, while not special, is a nice way to tie all the levels together, and the need to collect coins is a good twist to the gameplay. It just feels like they weren’t quite finished with this game when they released it. And, of course, there’s no music.

Overall Score: 6/10
Product Page: Golden Skull Page
You can try or buy Golden Skull for $14.95 here