is a platform game

Platform game

A platform game is a video game characterized by requiring the player to jump to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles . It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps...

 by Konami

Konami

is a Japanese leading developer and publisher of numerous popular and strong-selling toys, trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, slot machines, arcade cabinets and video games...

 for the Family Computer Disk System. It was only released in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 on August 17, 1987.

Synopsis

A magic red jewel, known as the Almana, is stolen from an unnamed village. A thief runs off with the jewel and turns the entire village into stone. The game's hero must track down the thief and recover the stolen jewel.

Gameplay

The player takes the role of an unnamed hero who must travel through six cavernous levels in search of the lost jewel. The player begins with thirty throwing knives as his weapon of attack. As he ventures through the levels he can find various other weapons. These include bombs, a handgun, boomerangs, a ball that destroys everything on screen, and a mace. He must destroy various cave dwelling creatures as well as henchmen, who sometimes drop these weapons.

The hero's main source of transportation is unique. Besides just walking and jumping, like most platform games, he must also use a special grappling hook to reach platforms that are too high. To make things a little more difficult, the grappling hook can only be launched from a diagonal direction and not just straight above.

The game itself is very reminiscent to the Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones

Colonel Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials...

film series. The appearance of the game's protagonist is not only nearly identical to the adventurer, but the game's cave environments and plot, which revolves around the main character recovering an ancient treasure, are very similar to his explorations. The game also borrows heavily from an earlier Konami release, Roc 'N Rope

Roc 'N Rope

Roc 'N Rope is a 1983 arcade game developed by Kosuka and published by Konami. The player, impersonating a flashlight- and harpoon gun- equipped archaeologist had to ascend a series of rocky platforms in a Lost World scenario to reach a Phoenix bird, the object of his quest, along the way he had to...

, with the main character firing ropes at platforms to cross wide chasms.