Cloud Kingdoms

Cloud Kingdoms is a puzzle game where the player controls the character of Terry, a green bouncing sphere with eyes, in his quest to recover his magic crystals that were stolen by the game's antagonist, Baron von Bonsai. The crystals have been scattered across a series of levels, the eponymous Cloud Kingdoms, which Terry must conquer in order to win the game. The player navigates Terry through each Kingdom from a top-down perspective and can move in eight directions, as well as jump over enemies, obstacles, and holes. Enemies include fairies that have been transformed into insects and black balls by Baron von Bonsai. There are 15 Kingdoms in the Commodore 64 version and 32 in all others.

Players begin the game with a preset choice of four Kingdoms to begin with, with each leading to four other kingdoms that are opened up once the level is won. The objective in each Kingdom is to collect all of the crystals and maneuver through hazards such as trap doors, slippery floors, magnet floors that prevent Terry from jumping, and pinball bumpers. The game overall has a time limit of 99 "Manukas", each of which is equivalent to approximately four seconds. Contact with lava fields or enemies drains the player's energy and, if all energy is lost, the level is reset and ten Manukas are subtracted from the remaining total.

Cloud Kingdoms was developed at Logotron by Dene Carter, who had previously worked on Druid and its sequel Enlightenment for the Commodore 64, as well as Dragon Lord. It was published under Logotron's publishing arm Millennium Interactive Ltd. The game contains a small assortment of sound effects, as well as music on the title screen, and tunes that play when particular items are collected, all composed by David Whittaker. 99 for a Commodore 64 cassette and disk respectively.

In addition to having fewer levels, the Commodore 64 version also omitted several styles of the enemies. The MS-DOS edition came out a week after the others and supported EGA and VGA graphics. It also featured fewer sounds than the other versions.

Reviews for Cloud Kingdom on Amiga computers were positive. Writing for Computer and Video Games, Paul Rand praised the graphics and gameplay over similar games such as Quedex, and enjoyed its "stimulating and addictive" challenge, rating it at 80%, while Australian Commodore and Amiga Review offered a higher estimation of 83%, with praise overall for the game. ACE magazine gave the Amiga version a score of 730 out of 1000, claiming that it was "taxing enough to provide a good few hours of solid entertainment", while Amiga Action gave it a similar overall score of 72%. Carsten Borgmeier of the German publication Amiga Joker gave the game 71%, docking points primarily for the game's high level of difficulty, while Kati Hamza's 78% for The One was based on concerns that the price might be too high for the amount of content offered.

Mark Caswell of The Games Machine held Cloud Kingdoms in high esteem, praising the sound, graphics, and gameplay with an overall 86% rating. Conversely, finding the game average all-around, Magnus Friskytt of the Swedish Datormagazin scored it 5 out of 10.