Overview

Solomon's Key is generally recognized as one of the most difficult games to appear on the NES or any other platform for that matter. The player must overcome unlimited enemy spawning, challenging level designs, a countdown timer, Dana's fragility, and limited ways to dispatch enemies. In addition, it's easy for players to unintentionally make levels impossible to clear while playing them.

Solomon's Key also has many hidden items and secret levels that are hard to find which enhances the reward for playing. The ending also slightly changes depending on which secret levels the player finds and completes, if any.

Gameplay

The main character, Dana is sent to retrieve "Solomon's Key" to restore the world to light from demons that were accidentally released. The object of the game is to advance through the 50 rooms of "Constellation Space" by acquiring a key to the door that leads to the next room before a timer runs out. The game incorporates elements of the platform shooter genre. Dana can run, jump, create or destroy orange blocks adjacent to him as well as create fireballs to destroy demons. The orange blocks can also be destroyed by jumping into them twice. Along the way Dana can acquire items to upgrade his firepower and extra lives as well as item that award bonus points and unlock hidden rooms. With certain items, Dana must make, then break blocks (sometimes in a certain manner) to make these appear.

Levels

There are 64 levels in total with 15 being secret. The main levels are divided into groups of 4 with one group for each Zodiac constellation. The final level is called Solomon's room. Each constellation has a secret bonus room which can only be accessed by finding a seal for the constellation in the last room of the group. The other three levels are Page of Time, The Page of Space, and the Princess Room which occur only if the player has acquired the hidden Seals of Solomon.


Notes

There is a way to continue at the game over screen on the NES version. Hold UP along with the A and B buttons. Dana will start over from scratch (no scroll upgrades) at the last level completed, however Solomon's Seals will be retained. If a player gets a game over after room 40, the game will restart at room 40 if this cheat is used.

At the Game Over Screen a "GDV" score also appears. The score uses a weighted composite of several factors (like levels completed, items found, time and points) which gives the player a good idea of how well the last game was played. The higher the GDV the better the game.

In 1993, a sequel was released for the NES named Fire 'N Ice in North America but called Solomon's Key 2 elsewhere. A sequel for the original Game Boy entitled "Solomon's Club" was released in 1995. The 1999 Game Boy Color release Monster Rancher Explorer (called simply "Solomon" in Japan) by Tecmo is an updated port of Solomon's Key. The game was released for the Wii's Virtual Console on November 19th, 2006 in North America.[1] and on December 15, 2006 in Europe.

This description is from Wikipedia