Treasure Adventure Game is a freeware sidescrolling Metroidvania / Zelda-style game with a pirate / nautical theme; in it, your character has to search for treasure maps, then use them to sail the two-dimensional seas to various islands to search for long-lost treasure.
In ancient times, the world's landmass was lumped together into one continent. The people of that continent lived peacefully until one day an evil demon invaded and threatened to destroy the world. A hero by the name of Huayin, traveled the continent to search for 12 magical artifacts that he used to battle and defeat the demon, the battle causing the continent to split apart into the world as we know it today. Centuries later, two friends named Gagwin and Baggus have been traveling the globe, accompanied by Gagwin's son, and manage to find all 12 artifacts once again. The trio lands on the island where a mystical temple is held, which can only be opened if one has all of the artifacts, and leads to great riches. The trio enters the temple...and the flashback ends.
Cut to the present day, where a boy lives on a nearby island with an old woman he calls his grandmother. For his birthday, she gives him a boat that he can ride in and travel to other islands, and tells him how she found him washed up on shore years ago wrapped in a map. The map leads the boy to a museum that Baggus has built, and learns about the 3 essentials of adventuring, meets a talking parrot, and is then told about the 12 artifacts which Baggus has built the museum to exhibit. Baggus asks the boy to retrieve the artifacts once more.
The people behind the game created a re-imagined version of it called Treasure Adventure World
, published by Chucklefish, the creators of Starbound.
Examples:
- Abusive Parents: Gagwin chopped off his own son's hand in order to get the MacGuffin.
- All There in the Script: Every single NPC and creature (including, curiously, the Spikes of Doom) gets a proper full name in the credits. You're lucky if you even get a first name for most of the entities you encounter in the game itself.
- Big Bad: At first, it's foreshadowed that this is the demon from Huayin's time, but Tony Ward later fills the role. As it turns out, they're one and the same.
- Big Boo's Haunt: One of the islands, especially its castle. Most of the ghosts are friendly, but not all.
- Commonplace Rare:
- The amount of work you have to go throughnote to get a totally ordinary non-magical flashlight takes the cake. Possibly justified if it's Lost Technology, but it isn't made clear.
- Your initial compass requires a similar amount of work, and is explicitly stated to be shoddy and commonplace — one shopkeeper says he 'hopes you didn't pay too much for it.'
- Heck, early on you have to do a non-trivial amount of work to get a totally ordinary, non-magical paper hat.
- Collection Sidequest: The dimensional shards.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Tony Ward.
- Deus ex Machina Played about as straight as it gets: At the end of the climactic boss fight, The Big Bad announces that he is too powerful to be defeated, and is about to destroy the world...when Otis steps in.
- Devil in Disguise: Tony Ward is actually a demon-like evil deity who took over the world via GloboCorp to make it develop the way he wanted it to when it was first made - science over magic. The player character's actions end up restoring his powers in a textbook Xanatos Gambit.
- Disney Villain Death: Baggus dies in this way at the end.
- Evil, Inc.: Half the citizens of Danausel suspect that GloboCorp is this. They're right.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Hero is only ever called "Boy," "Kid," or Gagwin's son.
- Face–Heel Turn : Both Gagwin and Baggus go through one; Gagwin wants to sell the treasures to Tony Ward whereas Baggus is eventually willing to take
extreme measures to rid the world of all suffering. - Final Boss, New Dimension: The final fight begins in the pocket dimension used for warping between islands. Every time the Big Bad is hit, he flees to a different dimension, which is represented by having him throw sprites from some NES games at you.
- Forced Transformation: Gagwin was turned into a parrot in punishment for harming his son.
- Greed: The reason for Gagwin's fall from grace.
- Giant Foot of Stomping: The Big Bad's final fate is to get crushed by one of these.
- Goldfish Poop Gang: Roelof and Lugus are fought multiple times. They're finally killed at the end of their last battle.
- Have You Seen My God?: In the beginning, the world was created by three deities: Otus, god of the earth and morality; Wakanda, goddess of animals and magic; and Louyang, god of humanity and science. After they were done creating it, though, they are believed to have disappeared, interfering with their creation no more. This is not quite true; while they all agreed to let their creation take its own course, Louyang betrayed the others and became the demon of legend, trying to destroy the world and being thwarted by Huayin. Wakanda turned into a crane by the name of "Wendy" after the cataclysm, and became the leader of the animal village on Boracay island. Otus kept the form of a giant human (you only ever see his enormous feet), and stayed on Somora island, where he occasionally stamps and causes earthquakes to shake the insect village inside the island out of its complacency.
- Heel–Face Turn: A very subtle one. Gagwin admits that he had at first accompanied you in hopes of returning to his human form. Eventually, however, he realized that he wanted to make an effort to be a better father.
- Heroic Mime: The only thing said by the hero is in a flashback near the end.
- Hook Hand: The main character has a hook for one hand, and uses it both as his primary weapon and to grab on to terrain.
- Interface Screw: When struck by mushrooms. Their smoke also does this, but it lasts longer and isn't as "strong". Finally, if you present Psaul with some mushroom smoke, expect a very heavy one.
- Interface Spoiler: The interface reveals the number of maps and items you'll get right off the bat... but it's averted in that some items are upgrades or components to existing ones, and don't get their own space on the interface.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: Using smoked hallucinogenic mushrooms, no less.
- Leitmotif: Most recurring characters have one.
- MacGuffin: The final treasure at the end of the temple is sought after by everyone that knows about it.
- Magic Versus Science: In the backstory, magic-using animals and science-using humans fought a huge destructive war. In the modern age, both magic and science are Lost Technology to an extent, and both sides use a bit of each.
- MegaCorp: GloboCorp
- Minecart Madness: There's a brief chase scene through a mine after getting one of the treasures.
- Money Spider: Nearly every enemy drops a small quantity of coins on death.
- Mushroom Samba: Small mushrooms in one area both give you an Interface Screw and reveal hidden platforms. You can use fire to smoke them for a longer, smoother trip. They're also used for a Journey to the Center of the Mind.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Tony Ward would never have regained his powers if you had not deactivated the holy barrier.
- No Ending: The credits roll immediately after Louyang is defeated, with absolutely no Dénouement. If you got the "Bad End", that's all you get.
- The "Good End" has a little bit more to it, but it's hard to tell how serious it is. You return to your house, now inhabited by animals that spout out lines from NES and SNES games, before a boat outside claims your grandmother has been kidnapped by robot ninjas, and asks if you're a bad enough dude to save her, implying an And the Adventure Continues ending. There is no particular attempt to tie any of this to the main plot.
- No Name Given: The main character.
- Non-Human Sidekick: Your parrot, of course. Subverted in that it's actually your cursed father.
- 100% Completion: There's a percent-completion indicator on your save, but getting the Golden Ending requires you do even more; simply having 100% isn't enough (mainly, you need to buy the house and all the various things that go into it. Thankfully, completing the Collection Sidequest isn't necessary.)
- Only the Pure of Heart: The Hero's pure-hearted nature allows him to access the final treasure.
- Plot Coupon: Each of the twelve treasures used by the original hero allows you to advance further into the temple.
- Prematurely Bald: The Hero
- Redemption Equals Death: Near the end, the parrot makes the unsurprising reveal that he actually is Gagwin, the hero's father. Then he does a Heroic Sacrifice and dies saying that he feels sorry about what he once did to his son and that he is proud of him.
- Shout-Out:
- When you hack into the master computer in GloboCorp HQ and activate it, it greets you with "Greetings, User. Shall we play a game?"
- When fighting a giant crawling robot with a big obvious weakpoint, using a mushroom to enter Mushroom Samba mode causes you to hallucinate that it is a Giant Enemy Crab.
- Roelof and Lugus complain about 'you meddling kids', even though there's only one of you.
- The final boss fight takes you through the Mushroom Kingdom, Dream Land, and Dracula's Castle. Louyang tosses giant versions of objects from the appropriate "dimension" at you - POW Blocks, Maxim Tomatoes, skeletons, etc.
- The Golden Ending has multiple references to NES games in its dialogue.
- The three mice: Jerry, Mickey and Basil.
- Tactical Suicide Boss: Both played straight and averted. At one point, you have to fight a robot whose only weakpoint is the huge button on its back, which it regularly exposes... until midway through the fight, when it announces it has analyzed your pattern and stops exposing it. Luckily, some friendly allies arrive just in time. Played entirely straight by several other bosses.
- Talking Animal: Half the inhabitants of the world are talking animals, not humans.
- Take Over the World: Tony Ward's end goal.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The demon's end goal, of course. He's still around, but he gives up on it until he finds out about your quest.
- Those Two Guys: Roelof and Lugus.
- Treasure Map: They reveal the location of secret passages that lead to key items and dungeons.
- Warp Whistle: The bottle doubles as a warp whistle, since it lets you grab and release the black circles present on every island to turn them into portals to a 'hyperspace' other dimension.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Baggus is revealed to be one in his Face–Heel Turn.
- Xanatos Gambit: Everything bad that turns out to be GloboCorp's fault suggests that Tony Ward is trying to kill off as many animals as possible while moving humanity and technology forward and, of course, taking over the world. He tells you that your quest is a threat to the latter goal, but collecting all 12 artifacts and finding the "treasure" in the temple returns him to his true form - Louyang, the god of humanity and science, and the demon that tried to destroy the world.
