City Of Brass

A THOUSAND AND ONE DEATHS

- Martin Kitts

With echoes of Spelunky in its randomly generated treasure hunt and of Prince Of Persia in its trap-filled, scimitar-swinging Arabian theme, City Of Brass is a short game that will test your patience and endurance like few others.

Although the end is only 12 brief levels and a few bosses away, the difficulty is set so high that death is always waiting around the next corner, and as is traditional in this rogue like genre, dying means you get stripped of all your hard-earned items and dumped back at the start.

You enter the city armed carrying only a basic sword, a whip, and (presumably) a humungous backpack in which to store the hundreds of gold statuettes and jewel-encrusted plates you grab as you race through the streets and buildings, pursued by howling skeletal warriors.

The levels are filled with a ludicrous amount of traps, and because the layout changes every time, you can never be sure whether a door will conceal a pit of spikes or some spears that stab up through the floor, or a vent that puffs out an extremely annoying blast of deadly sand with no obvious indication of its lethal radius. As a general rule you can consider all doorways to be probable deathtraps, and rushing through them will inevitably whittle away your precious health points.