Gold For Retirement

TheAwakening
Oct 3
2 min read

Overview

You are a knight who soon realizes adventuring never works out for you, but you cannot quit just yet without gold in your coffers.

In Gold for Retirement you must navigate through dangerous mazes filled with monsters, traps, and pits that will require precise, near-perfect leaps. Levels are few, but later levels become increasingly difficult as you must think before jumping through the spikes and swirling/dangling axes.

Gameplay

Your only moves in this game are to move & jump, keeping in mind the hundreds of hazards in the level. You are equipped with a flying gadget that lasts for a couple of seconds to reach otherwise unreachable gaps. You also have a disposable sword that can be used as cover to block arrows in a straight line for a few seconds, but it’s only one sword, and it does not respawn until you die.

Levels are filled with blobs, skeletons, bats, and goblins. Some will move towards you or patrol in a line until they clash with you. Attacking will remove them from the rest of the level. Keep in mind you cannot move while doing so, and there’s a small window when the attack connects and you can attack again. Bats usually like to hover in between a space where you must jump. Skeletons will charge surprisingly fast towards you, and goblins will patrol an area quickly enough. Traps will always ignore your foes.

Placed in the level are spikes, spears, flames, and axes that will eliminate you, sending you back to the starting portal. To avoid such traps, we need to use a combination of jumping and hovering with our flying apparatus, keeping in mind it does not recharge while it's in use. There are also hovering/jumping pads placed in certain gaps, but the former will drop after we step on it. We need to collect a couple, or several, coins before we can move to the exit red portal. Some locations are also blocked behind gates, and thus we need to find a key placed elsewhere in the level.

There is no timer to keep record of, but the number of times we died in our journey is available in the pause menu. With that said, the only advice for this game is to take it slow and look before leaping. When we need to hover, there will be times the momentum will take effect. The game speed is a bit faster to handle, but it's not so difficult at first glance. There are not a lot of stages, but you can try to unlock the achievements if you think the game has become manageable to you.

Audio & Graphics

One of the shines is in its introductory video when you start the adventure; it's very silly to watch. Its pixel graphics sure are nostalgic in some way. The soundtrack is also very good and retro, a simple reminder of how this game can be difficult at times. There is almost no UI besides the fuel meter and the amount of coins we’ve collected.