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In "Skin and Bones," you play as both of the titular characters, "Skin," the young human, and "Bones," some sort of mixed-up skeletal zombie.

The story, insofar as there is one, is that Skin and his inexplicably skinny buddy are both the pawns of a wizard who wants them to gather up all of the gems throughout a series of levels that include springy platforms, spiked pits, switches, and a number of enemies whose only real story is that this is where they happen to enjoy chilling out. If they can do that and kill a kid wearing a baseball cap, then so much the better.

The action is purely that of other platform-type games going all the way back to the original Pac-man: your goal is to collect all of a specific type item in a level, without managing to get yourself killed. Along the way, you will also encounter other items, like coins and or bubbles that spell out the word "BONUS," but these will only serve to add points to your score, an objective that seems increasingly trivial as the decades move on.

The graphics are simple, but seem like an after-thought: our stalwart heroes and their many nemeses seem to be forever out-of-focus. The designs are good enough that you can tell what's about to kill you, but if you were ever asked to pick one out of a line-up, you'd be hard-pressed to name specific features. Everything is blurry.

The puzzles are okay, but simplistic: rarely is a challenge presented that requires you to do more than simply call you buddy over to let you stand on his head.

"Skin and Bones" feels like a game that was designed simply to use the oh-so-clever name: it's completely generic, and contains nothing that is noteworthy. Everything that you see in "Skin and Bones" has been seen already in the games of the past - indeed, the game is even touted as possessing a "retro style," which must mean that it's like every other game you played twenty years ago.

There is simply nothing about "Skin and Bones" that allows it to stand out among the many other downloadable games out there. There is nothing innovative about the gameplay, and the characters are uninspired. As far as time-wasters go, you could do better than to drop your change on this title.

2/5

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