Cursed Treasure: Don't Touch My Gems!

Most tower defense games in 2010 asked you to stop a horde before it reached a base you were told to care about. Cursed Treasure: Don't Touch My Gems! asked a smarter question first: what if the horde was the good guys, and you were the thing standing between them and treasure you'd already decided was yours? It's a small reframe, but it's the reframe that got a third independent Flash game from a Russian mobile-games studio a sponsorship deal with NotDoppler and, by the developer's own account, the number-one player rating on Kongregate for the better part of a year. Fifteen years later, the premise still lands. The systems built around it are a more mixed case.

Defending the wrong side of the road

The setup is simple and it's stated with a straight face: you're the Overlord, five gems sit in a cave, and waves of "heroic" adventurers — knights, archers, ninjas, angels, lizard riders — are coming to steal them and run back the way they came. Let one escape with a gem and it's gone for good; lose all five and the level is over. Everything you build to stop that happening is drawn from the same evil-fantasy toolbox: Orc Dens, Undead Crypts and Demon Temples, each locked to a specific kind of ground. Dens only go on grass, crypts only on snow, temples only on bare dirt. That's a genuinely good piece of design tucked inside a fairly straightforward game — it means reading a level's terrain layout is not busywork before the "real" tower-placement decisions start, it is one of the real decisions, because the map itself decides which of your three answers is even on the table in a given spot.

A contemporary review from the game's first weeks online judged the three tower types close to evenly matched: crypts control crowds through slowing and chilling effects, temples trade range for raw damage, and dens sit in the well-rounded middle. That balance holds up as the game's strongest technical credit — a lot of tower defense games from the same period lean hard on one "correct" tower and make the other two decorative, and Cursed Treasure mostly avoids that trap across its thirty levels.

A tech tree that explains nothing, and a wall at level 14

Where the design gets noticeably less confident is progression. Experience earned from clearing levels buys skill points, and those points feed a branching upgrade tree for towers, spells and the Overlord's own abilities — but the game gives a first-time player almost nothing to go on about which branch does what before they've already committed points to it. That's not a retrospective complaint invented at a fifteen-year remove: a review written within the game's first month online flagged exactly this, describing new players as effectively guessing at their first several allocations. It's the kind of friction that a lot of 2010-era Flash games shipped with and a lot of contemporary players simply tolerated, but it reads as a real, avoidable gap rather than a period-appropriate limitation — clearer tooltips were not a technical problem Flash in 2010 couldn't solve.

The bigger and more frequently cited issue is a genuine difficulty spike around level 14, where fast, poison-throwing ninja enemies show up and the loop that worked comfortably for the first thirteen levels stops being enough. Both a period review and later player comments on the current listing describe the same fix: farm easier levels for extra experience and skill points before attempting to push past it. A well-placed wall can be good design — it forces you to actually use the systems the game spent thirteen levels teaching — but a wall that's most commonly described as something to grind around, rather than out-think, is a fair mark against a game that otherwise plays fair with its difficulty curve.

What it looked and sounded like, and what it later became

Presentation was a genuine strength in 2010: hand-drawn tower and enemy art, a fantasy palette that actually distinguishes orc, undead and demon aesthetics rather than reskinning the same sprite three times, and a score credited to composer Oleg Stepuro that a period reviewer singled out for building real atmosphere around a fairly small game. None of that is groundbreaking by today's standard, and it's worth being plain about that rather than grading it against 2026 art budgets — but weighed against its own genre and year, it's above the median for a free portal game with no publisher backing beyond a single sponsorship check.

What complicates a "how does it look today" answer is that the version most easily found now often isn't the 2010 one. IriySoft rebuilt Cursed Treasure in HTML5 using OpenFL in 2019 — explicitly to keep it playable as Flash Player's end-of-life approached — and folded in "improved art assets" the studio had originally created for the 2010 iPad port, Cursed Treasure HD, made in cooperation with Ninja Kiwi. IriySoft uploaded that remaster as a separate listing rather than overwriting the original, specifically so existing players wouldn't lose their save progress, which is a genuinely considerate piece of digital preservation on the developer's own part. It also means the polished, HTML5-native, mobile-friendly version circulating today is not the swf a 2010 player actually experienced, and a review judging "the original" owes readers that distinction plainly.

The business story behind the rating

The reason Cursed Treasure is worth a review at all, rather than a footnote among a hundred similar 2010 tower defense games, is what happened after it launched. IriySoft's own account of its history says the game had "a good sponsorship deal with NotDoppler" and, on the back of that, became the number-one rated game on Kongregate for close to a year — an extraordinary run for a small studio's third independently made Flash title, delivered with no marketing budget beyond whatever a single portal sponsorship check bought. That success is also why the franchise kept going long past its Flash-era shelf life: a Level Pack expansion on Kongregate almost exactly a year later, mobile apps, a full sequel that reached Steam in 2017 through Armor Games Studios, and a free-standing 2023 follow-up, Cursed Treasure 1.5, built on the same premise more than a decade on. Whatever its rough edges, the core idea had enough legs to fund a studio for fifteen years and counting.

Playability today

The original swf is not orphaned. As of a 23 February 2024 update, Armor Games' own published list of Flash titles restored under the Ruffle emulator includes both Cursed Treasure and Cursed Treasure: Level Pack!, meaning the original game can be played directly on Armor Games' site through Ruffle rather than a standalone emulator. The swf is also preserved in BlueMaxima's Flashpoint archive, the standard fallback for Flash titles that have lost live portal support entirely. What's checked and confirmed is that a preserved, emulator-run version of the original game exists and is reachable; this review did not itself load and play that build, and readers chasing the smoothest modern experience should be aware that the 2019 HTML5 remaster and the mobile apps are the actively maintained alternative, not a like-for-like substitute for the Flash original.

Final verdict

Cursed Treasure earned its year atop Kongregate's charts on the strength of one idea executed with real care: three balanced tower types, terrain that matters, and a villain's-eye framing of a genre that had mostly told the same hero story. It loses ground on everything built around that idea — a skill tree that explains itself to nobody and a difficulty spike that asks for grinding rather than cleverness. A 7.5 reflects a genuinely inventive, well-funded Flash-era success that still plays well in its first dozen levels, with real, dated friction sitting in the systems meant to carry it the rest of the way.