developed by Robit Studios (New York, NY)
first released November 26, 2011 for Windows, free
~108 MB
[website]
[trailer]
[soundtrack]

Played to completion (including the “good end”) in ~17 hours, 6/16/15–6/19/15.

[Youtube video of a complete narrated ~10 hour “let’s play” in 29 parts: (no playlist; here’s part 1)]
[or: Youtube video of a complete 3-hour “speedrun”]

Seventh of the seven GOG freebies when I signed up on April 8, 2012. Was added to the GOG catalogue March 22, 2012.

This game is the reason I joined GOG in the first place. I read this guy’s blog post, which ends by saying “this is a really good game, and I suggest you try it if you haven’t already — it is free, after all.” I played an hour or two, three years ago, and agreed that it was very charming. But then for some reason I didn’t stick with it.

Now I have.

This is one of those games with a toylike dollhouse world that just goes and goes, sprawling until it seems to embrace a little of everything. You come across a haunted castle on an uninhabited island AND a city with a nightclub AND a secret underground robot factory AND a sick mouse who needs go to the mouse doctor AND an ancient booby-trapped temple AND a treehouse village of talking animals, etc. etc. The appeal is much the same as with Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World or a Where’s Waldo illustration — you can focus yourself entirely into this safe, enclosed realm of tininess, and yet still be somewhere spacious and varied. The difference is that here the focusing is enforced by the computer; you never get to stand back and take it all in at one glance. But the experience ends up being the same, just as a hedge maze ends up feeling like the same basic activity as a pen-and-paper maze.

It’s a world designed to be exhausted while continuing to feel inexhaustible. I love it when games can pull that off. The key game from my past that comes to mind is Little Big Adventure (1994), which Treasure Adventure Game resembles in many respects, but lots of other games have created that same feeling. The feeling is the joy of the unfettered imagination.

Just a few entries ago I said that Ultima IV was off-putting to me because it had such a vast map; really I meant it was off-putting for having a map much vaster than its imagination, which is constrained rather artificially — aspirationally — to thy creaky caricature of thy Tolkien model. In Treasure Adventure Game, the worldspace is vast, but peopled by basically anything that came to mind.

Unsurprisingly, the stuff that came to the developer’s mind is all secondhand, but the secondhand toyshop of the childhood-cultural imagination is piled high with diverse stuff, too much for anyone to ever get bored of it. It’s one of those bustling, magical toyshops, like you see in movies — oh hey look, that itself is one of the images in the shop, in the middle of a teetering stack on one of these magical shelves. And these images, when they’re alive, are always melding and reforming, never quite exactly the same. So how “secondhand” can they be, really? They continually molt and burn and are born anew.

This game was created as one guy’s private learn-to-code exercise, which I think is part of what gives its pile-up of imagination such a wonderfully unassuming quality — his focused, ego-bound attention was always occupied with the technical, so the content was born free. 30 years ago when I started playing computer games, most games had some of that quality, the “eh, just call it Zork” attitude — the MIT attitude — which for all its shortcomings nonetheless imparts the potency of the living subconscious to whatever it generates. (That was another chapter concept from my abandoned book on video games.)

Everything in Treasure Adventure Game — a Zork of a title for sure — had a refreshingly authentic naivete. Yes, the game is also a deliberate and overt act of “retro,” and all its simple sunny-day innocence is demonstrably derived from Japanese games of decades past, but behind all that, organizing it, is a real live innocence and openness. It genuinely felt like being inside a game imagined by an eager 10-year-old.

The designer is in fact in his 30s. From what little I could glean online, he seems certainly to be a little dorky and isolated — but who isn’t, these days? I don’t have any grand theory about what makes him tick or why he was able to tap into such a childlike spirit. I don’t need to know; I’m just here to play.

In many ways it’s very similar to Cave Story, another solo homebrew freeware retro pixel action adventure. But Treasure Adventure Game is, on the one hand, less polished and professional than Cave Story, and on the other hand, more sympathetic to me personally as a big bundle of tropes. TAG is obviously American where Cave Story is obviously Japanese.

For any readers who are still unclear on this point: I am an American. (I’ve dropped many subtle clues over the years, but it was time to come right out and say it.)

I had a really nice time working my way through Treasure Adventure Game, and felt enthusiasm throughout. I found myself playing in very long and eager sessions, and even sticking around at the end to do the one or two extra errands necessary for the little “100%+” epilogue.

The design is riddled with little infelicities — lots of places where the platforming challenges expose the imperfections of the controls, or places where certain tasks edge into tedium, or where boring backtracking is inevitable, or action sequences feel needlessly finicky, etc. etc. There are, unsurprisingly, many places where the purely amateur spirit praised above turns out to be a liability or a distraction. The game is simply an uneven piece of work. But that overriding sense of genuine good-naturedness never flagged, and I was always able to forgive the rough spots and press on cheerfully toward the next bit of invention.

He did give it away for free, after all!

The music is excellent: right on the money for “innocent retro,” providing just the right degree of mood and shadow to give a real ambiance to the various locales, the haunted pyramids and whatnot, but never giving up — or for that matter overselling — the basic spirit of simple unencumbered play. These are the moods I go to games to find: the moods that exist within an overarching meta-mood of freedom, ease, well-being. The day-night cycle in this game is like a subtle mood sine wave, going on behind the action at all times. This feels healthy to me.

Part of the reason this game is freeware is that, since it was begun as a coding exercise, the designer wasn’t rigorous about using only resources to which he had the rights. When it was very well received and touted as a top-class freebie (by, for example, GOG), he probably regretted that.

So… for the past few years he’s has been remaking the game for commercial release (as “Treasure Adventure WORLD“) in a high-resolution “modern” style, which seems to me like a terrible error in judgment. Low-resolution graphics and high-resolution graphics have entirely different meanings and bring with them entirely different structural expectations for the underlying order of the game universe. I don’t think the soul or value of this game can possibly survive such a transition intact. The sample videos he’s posted sadden me, because having enjoyed the original, I’m rooting for him and want him to succeed, and my gut tells me that this thing he’s doing is embarrassingly ill-conceived.

But maybe I’m wrong! When I feel embarrassment I usually am.

The designer made six “post-mortem” videos where he plays while talking about making the game. They’re pretty Youtube-y but I made it through. Here’s the playlist.

Design, coding, graphics: Stephen Orlando
Music: Robert Ellis

Plus various minor acknowledgements for “additional graphics” (I think this means “borrowed graphics”), playtesting, etc. But really it’s a one-man game.