Golden Skull is an adventure story wrapped in a puzzle game. It most resembles the console game Puzzle Quest, which married puzzling and RPG elements to great and dangerously-addictive effect. This is more simple.
You play Saeed, a university student who has managed to get a huge poker debt that he must repay in a week - or lose his life. Luckily for him, one of his professors needs a fit young student to set off on a journey to find an ancient golden skull, and offers to pay off Saeed's debt in return for doing that.
Golden Skull is played by clicking on shapes to make them disappear. Any two identical shapes next to each other can be cleared, so the trick is to manage what you remove, so the shapes above will fall into a pattern that you can also remove. Lone shapes will not disappear. Sometimes a gold coin will be among the shapes, and you must remove what's around it until is hits the bottom of the screen, at which point you can collect it. The two or three levels in this demo, depending on the difficulty level, require you to collect five gold coins to finish a level.
The game is really easy to pick up, and you'll soon be tapping at speed, clearing the screen of the colored jewels. The problem is with the difficulty level - the easiest is so easy you don't have to think at all, and clicking randomly will complete levels, and while that's not true on the hardest setting, it's still not much of a challenge.
Despite that, these are only the first levels in the game, and if it's your cup of tea, you'll enjoy playing through the full game
Golden Skull may be pretty easy, but it's well designed, and a story line in a puzzle game is a welcome addition.
