By Kyle Carpenter
Treasure Adventure Game may very well be the quintessential indie game.
A bedroom coding exercise by Stephen Orlando, founder of Robit Studios, Treasure Adventure Game [henceforth TAG] is a labour of love that took over two years to complete. Let me begin by saying that TAG is excellent, and free. The game structure itself is a metroidvania that, in its emphasis on seafaring, shares gameplay DNA with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Although the game initially appears amateurish, with its simplistic graphics, uninspired title, and somewhat cliched introduction, TAG is a solid piece of design; it offers environmental puzzles that rely on iterative uses of a limited set of items, and progress in the game depends as much on figuring out the game’s systems as it does on acquiring new items. On this point, TAG is superior to the last several iterations of the adventure game series it mimics, such as Zelda and Metroid. I recommend you pick it up here (note: you will need a GOG account, but the game is again, free as a bird).
Treasure Adventure Game is very much a bedroom coding project, created by Stephen Orlando of Robit Studios with music by Robert Ellis. Nearly everything about the game communicates this unassuming origin. Even the front page of Ellis’ site makes this plain:
Welcome to Robit Studios. I make video games.
What I think this very open welcome belies is the cultural sophistication that is implicit in the game Orlando presents; this is what I meant by “the quintessential indie game” earlier in this review – this game very neatly encapsulates points I make about “what indie means” in an earlier article for this site. Specifically, this game presents an aesthetic that at once embraces a genre, but also distances itself from it through several strategies of signification .
Flip Him the Hook: Stickin’ It To The Man
For one, this game is distinctly anti-corporate. The Big Bad of the game is, predictably, a polluting corporation named Globocorp. On this point, TAG resembles a sizable portion of games released in the 90s during the heyday of Captain Planet and the Planeteers. However, while this is largely a generic approach, TAG differs from previous games in the strength of its ire; in how many other games is the president of the evil corporation [minor spoiler] ACTUALLY the devil?
What’s more, every nearly every employee of Globocorp the player meets over the course of the game complains about his or her job, telling the player character how lucky he is to be on an adventure. What is interesting about this is that these lines of dialogue reflect the game’s own production: the creation of the game itself appears to be an adventure,a quest for personal fulfillment for Orlando himself. This dialogue condemns wage-slaving while promoting precisely the spirit of adventure necessary to the independent developer, a thematic move that seems deliberately coded into the narrative; in a weirdly skewed way, TAG could be read as Orlando’s personal story, filtered through a series of exercises in genre.
Consequently, what we see here is a traditional mode of storytelling that manages to act as a comment on the creation of the game, reflecting both an unironic appreciation of genre while acting as a winking acknowledgment of the very act of making the game. Sure, the weight falls heavily on the former, but the wry presence of the game’s meta elements are nevertheless developed thoughout the game.
Game DNA: Unraveling the Genetic Code of Treasure Adventure Game
Perhaps the key to understanding Treasure Adventure Game comes from its ending: please note that the following section and video contains spoiler for the game’s final sequence – if that bothers you, again, download the game from here and beat it before you continue reading; if not, then by all means, continue.
In the game’s climactic scene, the player character is thrust into an interdimensional zone, where the villain of the game begins to throw the islands the player has been exploring to that point at him, using the very fabric of the game as ammunition. This is not the player’s first introduction to this extra dimension, as to that point it has been the game’s version of fast travel, a way to blink between islands with far less travel time. However, this new use is an exciting, breathless sequence that gives an exhilarating sense of drama as the player enters the core of this fictional universe.
After the player manages to score the requisite number of hits on the big bad (using an old item in a new way, naturally), the villain escapes into another, further embedded dimension of the game – which happens to be Super Mario Bros. The scrolling backdrop is taken from that game, and the boss begins to throw sprites from that series at the player. Once this stage is completed, you warp to the world of Kirby’s Adventure. This process repeats, and each time the player is thrown into another classic game series.
The message is clear: these other series are the dimensions of TAG, the genetic ancestry of the game. Each one is presented as being part of the fabric of TAG’s “reality,” the building blocks of its world. In one fell swoop, TAG builds a relationship with its inheritance, presenting it as both part of itself as well as a final joke in its design.
This tension between the past and the present parallels the game’s design: it takes the elements of those earlier games, while nevertheless filtering them through a more developed sense of game design belied by TAG’s retro-aesthetic. TAG is constantly playing with its own identity, giving hints of its origins while simultaneously presenting a straightforward adventure story.
In fact, the more I think about the game, the more I wonder if its title, which is as straightforward and workmanlike as it gets, isn’t a nod to the Japanese developer Treasure; certainly, TAG has its own share of multi-segmented boss fights and 2d visual trickery. Or maybe I’m thinking too hard, seeing more to the game than is really there. This is the trick of “indie” – it’s tough to pin down, to figure out exactly where the game stands – what is direct, and what is subversive – and this is why TAG is such an excellent example of that approach.
One thing I can say for sure, though, is that Treasure Adventure Game is absolutely worth the price of admission. Give it a shot.
