Lurker > KCF0107

damn, has it really already been a week?

Treasures of the Aegean

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/c/cf78ba6e.jpg

I played Outer Wilds the day it came out, and while I liked it a lot in the end, there were enough issues that I had with it to not consider it for my list. Treasures of the Aegean is clearly inspired by it, but it is without a doubt its own thing, and I don't want to give big fans of Outer Wilds the wrong impression.

Treasures of the Aegean is a time-looping pure puzzle-platformer where you play as a young treasure hunter looting an the ruins of a Minoan civilization on an uninhabited island when a natural disaster threatens the complete destruction of the island only for you to return to a point in time just before reaching the island. This is not a plot-centric game, but there is a decent amount of comic book-style substance in it for those who need that in their video game.

You will be doing platforming or solving puzzles (sometimes with platforming) at virtually all times, so this is not a game for those who have to catch their breath. It has been a few years, but I'm pretty sure you can pause and the timer won't go down at least. At any rate, you will be simulaneously collecting treasures that you come across (many of which just require a good grasp of the game's physics) that help extend your loop timer (I want to say that it starts around 5 minutes and can go past 20) while completing the game's spaced-out, meatier puzzles.

I was really taken aback by the relative complexity of the puzzles. I'm not trying to oversell these, but they aren't simple. Many aren't solvable just by looking at them and require scrutinizing the environment, not necessarily in the vicinity, for clues on solutions. Some of the more advanced ones require you gain knowledge about the overarching mystery from all over the map that are then placed in your journal. Once you collect a bunch of treasures to increase your loop time, you will have more than enough time to get from one end of the map to the other as puzzles don't save progress between loops and will need to be solved in one go to reap the benefits. To finally beat the game, you have to solve several puzzles all over the map, which can be pretty hectic but gave me a great sense of accomplishment.

If I had one issue with the game, it was the map. It looks great and really helps out if you need to plot a path or looking for places you haven't filled in/think may be hiding something, but the game doesn't track treasures or puzzle items for you, and you have to place markers on them manually. The problem is that at the time I played it (don't know if it was later updated to allow you), you could not remove markers and some of the things that I wanted to mark didn't have an appropriate looking sticker. It could get messy and confusing later in the game when I needed to do/find specific things.

Because the game is all action and doesn't let up, the 5-ish hour runtime is feels longer than it is but fulfilling nonetheless. The animation and flow of the game are very smooth, and I never felt that the game was tedious or overstayed its welcome. This is a small budget but highly polished and well-crafted game that I would recommend to most people.

As I have stated, I'm going to accelerate the rate to 500 so that Naye hopefully feels the pressure to finish the job by doing some small writeups for games that either I played after I finished, beat after I finished since I had a rule that I had to beat a non-endless/multiplayer rule to consider it on the list, or totally forgot about until later. These games aren't necessarily ones that would place on my Top 100 list, but they would garner honorable mention status at least.

next time...

next time...

I keep saying that I'm going to bump this topic by doing some post-list game entries, but I always tell myself next time

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Naye still has his Top

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I mean, we are just waiting on a single user's Top 5.

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For over a year, we have been down to a single user's Top 5

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