I really wanted to take this week off but a majority of the Keymailer games that I accepted are due by the end of the month. I didn’t necessarily like the first game but this week’s game has a charm to it that makes you want to play just one more round.

This week is Gilded Eternal.

Gilded Eternal is an arcade platformer from Scott Ethington. The game was released on May 17th for the PC. It retails for $10.

There are monsters that live underneath the castle and they are taking up too much space and they need to be eradicated. There is only one knight that can take on this task. There is a lot of money in this line of work and the Gilded Knight is the greediest Knight of them all of course he will take the job. Cull the numbers and live to tell the story. That’s it.

Gilded Eternal is simple in that when dropped into one of the five arenas you are tasked with eliminating the monsters but not by your own hand. Once enemies appear a hand appears and all you have to do is trap them. Once trapped they die and drop a coon to use in the shop after a few waves. The thing is, the more enemies you trap in hand consecutively the more coins multiply. Copper turns to silver and silver turns to gold for even more money.

After the enemies are removed from the planet three random items will drop from the ceiling and that’s your store. Items like shooting the hand instead of it being solitary, explosive jumps, small size, and the ability to run faster are a few options to choose from. The items you buy only last for the next room so picking and choosing when you need some assistance is vital to actually completing the game.

Each level has a different coat of paint and a few rearranged blocks to keep the platformer and monster wrangling fresh.

There are a lot of different enemy types that really keep the game from getting stale. A basic skull that follows the player, a spider that slowly falls, a bouncy ball that bounces back faster with each hit, and many other keeps the player on their toes in an attempt to vanquish them by running away.

For very little that Gilded Eternal presents it does look relatively good. I like how basic it looks and it is easy to distinguish everything. I like the whole thing.

Gilded Eternal is simple in its design and it is fun. Running from enemies to trap them in a giant hand to receive money to buy more fun abilities is fun. I liked using an Xbox controller to play but a keyboard is just fine. My wife liked watching me play the game and we both tensed up when I was just skating by with one HP.

The game is simple fun. It has the right amount of difficulty to want to play another round. Runs can last from a few minutes to about ten and it is just fun the whole time.