Dokuro is a side scrolling, puzzle solving platformer with a skeleton protagonist that can change into a pseudo prince on occasion, thanks to a magical elixir, in order to solve puzzles to rescue the princess from the Dark Lord.

There isn’t much of a story other than the Dark Lord kidnapped the blonde princess in order to wed her. Dokuro has mixed feelings about that, even though he is the Dark Lord’s subordinate.

The game’s art seems to be inspired from charcoal drawings, which makes the game very nice to look at. The music also seems to be pretty whimsical from time to time and helps set the mood, which is often somewhat silly.

Gameplay is pretty basic. The princess will walk from left to right and you must follow her while clearing her path so that she does not succumb to many of the Dark Lord’s devious traps. The princess does seem somewhat brainless at times, but she will run away from enemies and avoid pits, often waiting for you to switch to prince mode to carry her across.

Dokuro makes use of the Vita’s touch screen capabilities for drawing lines to connect swinging pendulums, lifting platforms and many more things with white and red chalk to get through the perilous dungeon, which keeps the gameplay fresh and exciting.

Boss fights can seem somewhat daunting at times, as you’ll be trying to maneuver boxes and such for the boss to jump on so that you can cause damage to them.

The puzzles go from trivial to extremely hard (making me want to chuck my Vita a few times).

In conclusion, if you enjoy puzzle solving games and/or platformers, and wish to test your mettle, this is the game for you. At 80 levels and a $19.99 price tag, you really can’t go wrong. If you are the controller chucking type, I suggest you hold off, as the Vita is still quite expensive to replace haha

[review pros=”Beautiful to look at
Great music and presentation
80 levels to test your puzzle solving skills” cons=”Levels are often only 30 seconds long
Very repetitive” score=75]