Scarabeus: Pearl of Nile

As the ancient Egyptians told, the god of the underworld Osiris was fatally sent down the Nile in a box.

Scarabeus: Pearl of Nile also sends you down the famous river, although in search of precious coloured pearls vital in its breed of orb-matching puzzle play.

Like Osiris's body-in-a-box, this puzzler unfortunately washes up on the banks of the Nile dead on arrival. Even though it possesses all the parts of a sound puzzle game, it's just too mundane to really get your blood pumping.

Its apparent simplicity acts as a trap. The tutorial stages detail a logical setup that focuses on grouping like-coloured pearls in rotating dials.

The pearls themselves roll in a leisurely way into play from the top of the screen. Your job is to turn the dials in either direction and flick the pearls out as you see fit.

Each dial comes with a colour of its own, the idea being to snake the pearls around maze-like levels into the dial's four matching slots to clear them from the board.

Filling every dial is the goal, but getting the pearls into play in the first place - leave them waiting at the top of the screen too long and they explode - and then keeping a fix on their movement proves challenging.

It's a setup complicated when different kinds of gateways and power-ups start showing up. Some only let certain coloured pearls through, for instance, while others spray paint each sphere a new shade entirely.

Such additions are both a help and a hindrance depending how you use them.

For example, arrows allow you to direct pearls down certain pathways. When you have several different coloured pearls wandering around the stage at any given time, though, managing to work out where you need to send each one and flipping the arrows at the right time is no easy task.

Indeed, several other problems arise when more than one pearl is in play: it's possible to accidentally re-spray pearls the wrong colour or forget about them entirely and leave them to detonate in the run.

To play, or not to play?

Such pitfalls are what Scarabeus: Pearl of Nile is about – without them, there wouldn't be a puzzle of any sort to solve. As a concept the gameplay is solid, but in practice it borders on the mundane.

There's little reward when you clear each dial, and there's scant incentive to keep doing so beyond the self-satisfaction that comes with getting on top of any game.

Without any reward or feeling of accomplishment to drive you forward, all you're left with is the pleasure of playing the game for its own sake. Disappointingly, it's too lacklustre a puzzler to incite the sort of enthusiasm for replay that other marble-matchers like Luxor possess.

Sadly, Scarabeus: Pearl of Nile proves to be anything but the treasure its name suggests.