Pharaohs’ Curse Gold

Written by Jake on May 20th, 2007 and posted in Reviews
Tags : 2D, action, adventure, downloadable, Egypt, Indie, pc, platformer

About four years ago a good friend of mine started to program a platform game for the Pocket PC called Curse of the Pharaohs. He wanted to make a really decent retro-style platform game with action and adventure elements, and he succeeded – it won lots of awards. Anyway, I helped him to test it and gave him a few suggestions that I thought would make it feel a bit more “arcadey”.

Around that time I was searching the Internet for similar games and found one called Pharaohs’ Curse Gold (note the position of the apostrophe meaning that there are more than one Pharaoh cursing you – by god!) and I gave it a quick blast. I mentioned it to my friend, remarking that the game has a similar name and at first glance appears to have some similar concepts, but actually it’s quite different.

Years later I got talking to Ancient Soft and ended up with a review copy of the game. Pharaohs’ Curse Gold is still selling today, 5 years after it was released, which is a testament to the longevity of some Indie games. So anyway, I felt duty bound to give it a good playing to find out more about it. I played the game with my two sons, the older of whom really enjoyed the game and kept asking me if we could play it again.

Apparently the game is based on an even older game but I can’t recall the name of it right now. Anyway, it’s a single screen 2D puzzle platformer set in Egypt. You are some kind of explorer/treasure hunter who goes into various tombs to collect all the gold whilst avoiding monsters and solving tricky puzzles along the way. Some levels consist of more than one screen and you can go off the edge of one screen to get onto another one (the game doesn’t scroll).

Getting to the gold often involves digging, drilling or hammering your way through breakable blocks. However, the various tools that you need to do this with e.g. shovels, hammers, picks etc are in short supply and must be used carefully. This is where the puzzle element comes in. You have to solve levels by using the tools in the correct order and then escape through a door that opens once all the gold has been collected. Naturally you’ll have to avoid the odd mummy and other monsters, and sometimes you’ll get a weapon like a throwing knife or boomerang that can be used to kill them (but the monsters often regenerate). There’s also a bit of block pushing and precision jumping thrown in for good measure.

Overall the game is fast paced, fun and addictive. It has that “one more level” type of feel, especially once you get used to how to solve the puzzles – but the puzzles are quite tricky! Luckily there’s a replay mode, which shows you how to solve the current level (although I’ve seen it go wrong before). The pixel perfect jumping is sometimes a bit frustrating because it happens so fast and you can’t jump very high. Also you can’t jump when you are holding items, but this adds to the puzzle side of things because you have to carefully plan your route. A joystick can be used instead of keys, which is a big plus in my books, but sometimes I found it to be a bit unresponsive and I’d sometimes die as a result. Oh, the music is intense and bit repetitive, sort of like old-school module music.

There isn’t any plot or map screen like most modern Indie games have these days and that’s one way in which the game shows its age. It also has some odd graphic inconsistencies. For example, the title screen is very nice looking, but the sub-screens are like weird old Amiga-style menus using small bitmap fonts and the game screen itself has unusual techno backgrounds that somehow don’t seem very ancient and tomblike. However, I was able to look past these and just get into the game puzzles. The game is Multi-lingual and has a Level Editor which some of you may enjoy.

I also found a couple of bugs when playing with the joystick that I’ll pre-warn you about so that you don’t encounter them as well. Firstly if you walk off the side of the screen with a joystick it doesn’t take you to next screen but it does if you use the keys – took a while for me to figure that one out! Also, blocks can’t be moved when you use joystick, you have to use keys – this one also annoyed me until I figured it out.

So a bit of a mixed bag then. Basically an older game that is showing it’s age and has a few bugs with joystick play, but it is a good solid platform puzzler which you may well enjoy. If I was rating it four years ago I’d have given it a higher score but taking into account the standard of modern Indie games I’ll have to mark it down a bit. However, there aren’t many games like this out there, so if you are into the subject matter then give it a go.

• Pharaohs’ Curse Gold Information

• Jake's Rating :

  Rating: 3.5
  Readers Rating : no rating yet
• Pharaohs’ Curse Gold website
• Price : $19.95
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