Video Game / Solomon's Keep

Solomon's Keep is a free Dungeon Crawler, released in 2010 for IOS platforms by Raptisoft. The player plays as Sirius/Siria/Sirge/Syren, a student wizard/witch whose final test is to traverse Solomon Dark's Keep and defeat him.

The student wizard/witch has four elemental abilities available: Magic Missile, Fireball, Frost Jet and Lightning. As they level up, they get new upgrades to their abilities and magic. Furthermore, two elements can be "welded" together to create a new magic spell.

A prequel to the game has been released, Solomon's Boneyard. It is an arena survival game featuring the same Big Bad and enemies. An interquel game, Solomon Dark, is currently in development.

Not to be confused with the much older Puzzle Platformer Solomon's Key.

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Tropes Associated with Solomon's Keep:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: The game's count on the enemies you kill when you beat the game. (Skeletons Shattered, Zombies Zapped, Demons Destroyed, Shadows Shafted, etc)
• Airborne Mook: Ghosts, who fly around very quickly and try to charge the player, slowing them on contact. Their airborne status allows them to fly over embers caused by Fireball. Quite an annoyance.
• All Your Powers Combined: If you learn two of the primary offensive spells, you can combine them into a new, unique spell which also merges the special attributes of the composite spells.
• Annoying Arrows:
  • The arrows used by the skeleton archers in the early floors of the game. They do hardly any damage.
  • Inverted in Solomon's Boneyard. You will learn to hate archers, as there are no walls to protect you from their arrows. If you don't have Magic Shield, a gust-producing skill or a few levels in Dash you're toast.
• Antagonist Title: Especially for the third game, which is literally just the Big Bad's name.
• Arrows on Fire: Flaming skeletons use these on you.
• Asteroids Monster: The Fire Demons split into tiny Imps on defeat. The even larger ones split into more. Later on, even the imps themselves can split again!
• Bag of Sharing: The Amazing Cabinet, which allows you to transfer items from one savegame to another. Be warned: transferring the same item more than three times will make the item useless.
  • In Solomon's Boneyard, you retain any gold you collect in order to save up for perks that let you last longer in subsequent plays. One such perk, "Magic Inventory", gives permanent storage for collected rings (but not potions).
• Banana Peel: If you manage to entirely clear a few floors, you may see one of these on the floor. Stepping on it will make you trip as well as making Solomon laugh at you (admittedly, it is pretty funny).
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Both a regular and an in-game example. When your character levels up, he gets to choose from three random upgrades. You can use the "Bribe Destiny" option to select which skill you want to level up, at the cost of gold. However, in order to get "Bribe Destiny", you have to buy it with real money.
• Chain Lightning: The "Chaining" subskill turns the Lightning spell into this. Welding the Lightning and Fireball spells creates Flame Lash, which is a flaming version of this.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Your projectile-based attacks will dissipate or explode on contact with treasure chests lying around. Enemy mages can also use projectiles, however, theirs will pass through treasure chests! Tough luck trying to hit an enemy mage behind a few rows of treasure chests...
• Dare to Be Badass: Killing enemies when your character has a sliver of life left will give you triple the "Awesomeness" you get from the enemy. The easiest way to do it is to get poisoned to low health (poison cannot kill you), and start spamming.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Both Frost Jet and Lightning do very little damage per hit, but they have a very fast rate of fire.
• Death Trap: The Gladiator Games sort. When you enter certain rooms, iron gates immediately block all the exits to prevent your escape, and then a horde of monsters will spawn. The only way out is to destroy the monsters before they destroy you, unless you're fortunate enough to have Teleport.
• Deflector Shields: One of the available secondary skills. Very important, as it prevents your Squishy Wizard character from taking direct damage. On later levels, enemy skeleton mages have them, making them a complete pain to take out. Solomon Dark also has this, but he periodically takes it off every time he does an attack.
• Dem Bones: Skeletons, which comprise a majority of enemy forces. Varieties include regular melee (with varying degrees of armor), archers, flaming archers, and the dreaded mages.
• Dracolich: Bone Daddy.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Kid Mode option makes you invincible, but prevents you from getting any achievements.
• Endless Game: Solomon's Boneyard, which can make Solomon's taunts add insult to injury.
• Energy Ball: Magic Missile is a non-elemental version, and Fireball is... well, guess. Welding Magic Missile with Frost Jet or Lightning creates ice- or lightning-elemental varieties.
• Escape Rope: The Magic Key, which allows you to return to town so that you can buy/sell items as well as improve skills.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Two kinds of zombies: regular ones, and the upgraded version that poison on contact and explode into a poison puddle when defeated. Be careful: they may be slow, but can kill your character in a matter of seconds.
• Evil Is Hammy: Solomon Dark is this throughout the entire game. Starting with his introduction.
  "Look at this. Another visitor. Well... stay a while. Staaaay FOREVER!"
• Evil Laugh: You'll be hearing Solomon Dark's evil laugh almost every minute, especially if you get trapped in an enclosed room or trigger an ambush.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Solomon Dark's voice is very hollow and low-pitched.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: The Infernal, the penultimate boss fought right before Solomon Dark. One of his attacks shoots fireballs that leave fire walls on the floor, but he purposely chooses to shoot them around your character. His other attack are moderately powerful Eye Beams, which have very strong Knock Back and are meant to push you into the flame walls.
• The Faceless: Solomon Dark. All the good wizards too, as their hats and hoods are so oversized to obscure their faces in a top-down view.
• Fireballs: The Fireball spell, natch. Fire Demons throw bouncy exploding ones towards you.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Three of the four primary spells: Fireball, Frost Jet, and Lightning.
• Flaming Skulls: Present on the flaming skeleton enemies, of course. The next-to-last boss is a giant floating skull on fire. Solomon Dark himself can shoot homing projectiles shaped like these.
• Flunky Boss: Most of them, to some extent. Charles The Hammer has mooks which periodically appear from offscreen, Bone Daddy spits out poison along with maggots, Monculus can spawn two smaller copies of himself, and Solomon Dark can summon imps, armored flaming skeletons, and even fire demons to beat the crap out of you.
  • In Solomon's Boneyard, the flame walls generated by The Unholy spawn a cluster of imps.
• Fragile Speedster: Imps. Very fast and annoying, and they have one of the lowest hit points in the game.
• Giant Mook: Large demons, which have the most health of any regular mook.
  • Mini Mook: Imps, which can be created when you kill a Demon. Very weak, but they always come in large numbers to put on the hurt. Plus, they're fast!
• Harder Than Hard: Demigod Mode, no questions asked. Enemies move more than twice as fast and attack more than twice as fast. And ALL enemy mages have magic shields!
• Heavily Armored Mook: Skeletons start to appear in tougher and stronger armor as you progress up the tower. The strongest ones wear a full set... while on fire, no less.
• Homing Projectile: The Magic Missile weapon. Then there are those ice and poison Skeleton Mages, who fire homing balls that will slow you down/poison you. Solomon Dark can fire homing Flaming Skulls at you.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Student, Wizard, Archmage, and Demigod.
• Invisible Monsters: The Shadow enemies, who only reveal their black forms when they're near you. Thankfully, they do not have much health.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The opening line to the game.
• Kaizo Trap: Subverted. If you clear 4+ floors and then clear the current one, Solomon Dark himself may appear and whack your character with a very powerful strike, however, it cannot kill and can only reduce your HP to One. You can't die once you cleared a level (unless you got hit by a rogue projectile at low health or something)
• Kick the Dog: See Kaizo Trap above. Solomon Dark probably does that For the Evulz.
  "Muahahahaha! Blue wizard needs potion badly!"
• Large Ham: Solomon Dark, who else?
• Last Chance Hit Point: As long as you have health, you will survive a fatal attack and be brought down to 0 hp. The next attack will kill you, however.
• Limit Break: Not exactly, but each elemental spell has a special secondary ability at higher levels that will greatly help in destroying enemies or reducing damage.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: At level one, your character has slight trouble with even the weakest physical-attacking skeleton horde. He gets a lot stronger than the melee enemies once his spells and skills level up.
  • The skeleton mages also play it straight on harder difficulties. Poor health? Well, they do have a Magic Shield that can allow them to tank and spam... Most of other enemies with loads of health are either physical attackers (Zombies) or Demonic Spiders (Demons), and even these guys have less health than a Magic Shield on higher difficulties.
• Luck-Based Mission: Hope you can get the right perks each time you level up... or just Bribe Destiny. Turned up even higher if you decide to do the Random Skills challenge — the game picks a random skill for you each time! (Hint: do it only after you've upped all your primary skills.)
• Macross Missile Massacre: Get Magic Missiles (or a weld with it), fully upgrade More Missiles, Faster Caster and Battle Mage (with items to go beyond the usual cap), then equip a +150% faster casting ring.
• Mage Tower: The eponymous Solomon's Keep. Well, it's more of a Mage Castle, but still...
• Malevolent Architecture: Of all things, treasure chests. They have the nasty habit of sitting there... and blocking Magic Missile and Fireball projectiles. The enemies have no such restrictions with these and can fire their own projectiles through them.
• The Man Behind the Monsters: Solomon Dark. Justified, as he's a Necromancer.
• Man on Fire: Well, skeletons on fire.
• Meta Power-Up: The "Creativity" skill, which allows you to choose between four perks on level-up instead of three (it also lowers perk requirements by 5 levels).
• Mighty Glacier: The zombies. They are very slow, but if you are careless enough to get near one, you'll be dead in mere seconds.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Solomon Dark.
• Necromancer: Solomon Dark. He also knows how to summon flaming demons as well. He's probably very proficient at it — in Solomon's Boneyard, he can summon skeletons, imps, zombies and ghosts from the edges of the screen... while he's busy digging up graves!
• New Game Plus: Every time you manage to beat the game, you get to play a harder difficulty. Enemies will have more health and bosses will use new moves, but you also get better equipment.
  • Saving up gold to buy perks in Solomon's Boneyard makes basically every subsequent play into this.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Zombies, Ghosts, Skeletons, etc.
• Nintendo Hard: Anything above Archmage difficulty. On Demigod, the regular mooks have a lot of health, move more than twice as fast, and attack at around three times the speed.
• Non-Elemental: Magic Missiles.
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons in this game are horned Energy Beings made of fire that throw exploding fireballs. And they split into Imps when they are killed.
• Percent Damage Attack: Ether Charge, the special ability of Magic Missiles. It will hit all enemies on screen for a percentage of their health, but only if they were at maximum hitpoints.
• Permadeath: Hardcore Mode, which locks you out of your game when you die even once. Beating Demigod difficulty (without the use of Kid Mode) allows you to play Gauntlet Mode, where you can "keep playing until you die".
• Recurring Boss Template: The Infernal (student difficulty), The Unincarnate (wizard difficulty), The Unsummonable (archmage difficulty) and The Unholy (demigod). You fight one of them right before Solomon Dark. They all use eye beams and fire walls, but a new attack is added for each proceeding difficulty.
  • This progression of boss difficulties is repeated for Solomon's Boneyard.
• Scoring Points: Known as "Awesomeness" in this game. You get them by killing mooks and bosses, and multiplied when you: 1) kill mooks while in a trap room; 2) kill mooks when at low health; 3) play on higher difficulties. You lose them from dying or returning to town.
• Shout-Out:
  • When you first meet Solomon in front of the castle, he says "stay a while, stay FOREVER!!!"
  • "Muahahahaha! Blue Wizard needs potion badly!"
  • The game's ending has a kill count for each type of enemy. Usually done in Added Alliterative Appeal for most enemies, but for Ghosts, it says "Ghosts Busted"
  • Could be just a coincidence- the fireballs that demons and Monculus throw bounce on the floor twice before exploding on the third. Where else have we seen bouncy fireballs?
• Spread Shot: Magic Missiles turn into this with a few levels in the "More Missiles" skill.
• Squishy Wizard: Your character.
• Stationary Boss: Bone Daddy.
• Status Effects: Poison, which drains your health for a set period of time but cannot kill you, and slow, which makes you slower.
• Stone Wall: Having a high-leveled Frost Jet and high-leveled Harden will make you into this. The damage is rather weak on large enemies, but it will make you Nigh-Invulnerable.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: Solomon Dark takes down his Magic Shield every time he does an attack. Hit him hard when he does so. He fixes this on higher difficulty levels and above.
• The Slow Walk: You can do this with the Harden ability (an upgrade to Frost Jet). It makes you gain a lot of armor WHILE firing Frost Jet, to the point that most enemy attack will be unable to scratch you. Then all you have to do is walk towards the enemy (as Frost Jet has somewhat limited range).
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Monculus (a Beholder). He spits out very damaging, homing bouncy fireballs (similar to the demons), and unlike Charles and Bone Daddy, he will chase you out of the room. Plus, he is also able to summon two smaller copies of himself that can take quite a bit of damage, and if those get to you, they drain your health and give it back to Monculus!
• Warm-Up Boss: Charles the Hammer — he doesn't leave the room he's in, and only attacks with a slow, easy to avoid physical strike.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Blizzard Beam, welded from Frost Jet and Lightning. The Unincarnate, The Unsummonable and The Unholy also have one.

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