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Treasure Hunt in the Amazon Reviews
Author: Kenneth Pedersen and Niels
Søndergaard
Date: 2019
ADRIFT 5.0
Reviewed by
MathBrush
This game is a remake of a 1985 Danish game (which explains
the two authors).
The game warns you that it comes with randomization,
hunger timers, etc. and has a really clever idea: allowing you to turn all of
those off. I tried playing with them on at first, and it was actually fun, since
the map wasn't too confusing (especially with the automap. And Adrift online
makes playing a lot better!). The music and images worked well with the text.
Some parts of the interactivity just seem too farfetched to guess on
your own, though. I knew I needed to (Spoiler - click to show), and I knew that
(Spoiler - click to show), but I never thought the two would be combined to
solve a puzzle. And some tools seem like they could have many uses (such as the
(Spoiler - click to show)). But a lot of this stems from older game design where
it was expected the player would only have a few games available and play each
of them off and on for multiple days or weeks.
More concerning is the
inherent colonialism in the game. I ran into this when adapting Sherlock Holmes
in to a game; I left in negative references to gypsies, and the feedback I
received taught me a lot more about the negative experiences gypsies have had
over the years (including in the Holocaust!) This game does something similar,
where the natives are portrayed as more or less dumb and associated with
alcohol, and there are no moral qualms about entering sacred spaces and stealing
artifacts to take back to Europe. This wasn't exactly unusual in 1985 (just look
at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from the year before!), but sticks out
now, to me, especially since I've also adapted older works with colonialist
views. I don't really have any advice, these are just my thoughts.
Reviewed by Stian
Treasure Hunt in the Amazon is not a great game by today’s standards. It shows that it was originally crafted in 1985, and I suppose it was a relatively decent game back then. The remake is certainly decently implemented and lets you disable all the elements of time and randomness that made the original difficult to finish on a first playthrough. Without such restrictions, however, the game became surprisingly easy; the map is not big, the verbs don’t have to be guessed, the descriptions are sparse, and an automap makes it easy to navigate. In the end it took about 15 minutes to play through. It was nice to play, but rather as a curiosity – a way to experience a classic from the eighties through the comfort of the present.
Reviewed by Antimony
And in the kind of tonal whiplash I love IFComp for, a 1985 puzzler,
translated and updated. I'm going to try to play it in the online option.
The online engine is very slow (although switching browsers helped), but I'm
not going to blame the game for that. I really, really appreciate the modern
conveniences; thank you no hunger timer. It's sturdily implemented, but
definitely old-school. Also, I'm completely stuck not very far in. The
walkthrough point me to the fact that I'd tried the right idea, but hadn't
examined the right thing (getting the rope). It also points me to needing an
item I was already sure I needed, but hadn't found, and ended up needing the
walkthrough to locate. Cute, but very, very old-school, complete with
stereotypical generic natives, illogical puzzles, and unnecessarily large caves.
The modernization and translation is really solidly done, though.
Reviewed by Alex/Comfort Castle
Played 7th October
Download version played in ADRIFT Runner
Playtime:
70mins, including 1hr first playthrough and 10mins second run
Treasure
Hunt in the Amazon is an hour-long ADRIFT parser game, originally written by
Søndergaard in 1985 and translated by Pederson for IFComp. In this game, the
player has 10 days to find a jewelled crown before the Amazonian area the game
is set in floods. However, this timer and other features can be disabled at the
start of the game.
If you’re going to translate and re-release a
34-year-old game, this is the way to do it. The features you can disable are
basically a list of all the classic text adventure challenges which died out
because they weren’t actually very fun: you can disable the timer, a hunger
daemon, the inventory limit, and/or random item placement. I really appreciate
that these are completely optional – Treasure Hunt is a short game now, but I
suspect it was a lot longer if you had to contend with these back in the day. (I
disabled all the challenges for my first run, and then did a quick second run
with the time limit and hunger enabled – I cut it pretty close with hunger, even
knowing where to go, and I bet that randomised items would make the game
virtually impossible on some runs.)
The translation seems very good, not
that I have any knowledge of the original Danish. I don’t recall seeing any
typos, and there’s no phrasing that struck me as being particularly awkward.
Room descriptions are barebones but well-implemented – I didn’t see as much of
“you can’t see any x here” as I have done in other parser games. The game is
spruced up with some lovely little cartoons by Steffen Vedsted, with an explorer
who looks like he’s the main character of a newspaper comic which has
inexplicably been running for 70 years, and soundtracked with some of Eric
Matyas’ compositions, enough of them so that repeat songs don’t get annoying.
It’s some of the best presentation I’ve seen in the competition so far this
year.
This is primarily a puzzle game, as many 80s text adventures were.
It’s fairly straightforward. There are no red herrings, and most items have one
use, so that it feels like a series of keys to open doors. (There are a few
literal keys as well.) There’s a maze which Pederson warns you about right off
the bat, but it’s completely benign, as he reassures the player – it has a neat
little solution, and you can’t even enter the maze until you’ve found the clues
you need. There are no striking or beautiful puzzles here, but there aren’t any
clangers either.
I do want to address the game’s colonial theming a
little bit, since it bothers me. Exploration narratives are risky because of
their historical connections to imperialism – here’s the white explorer heading
into wild spaces to map space and enlighten natives, that kind of thing.
Treasure Hunt in the Amazon is relatively benign, as these things go. There are
natives, presented as friendly and willing to help (the rationale being that
they need to raise money for after they evacuate the flood area) – I am curious
how truly happy they are to help us storm into the rainforest to steal the
ancient treasures and eat every animal like Naked Snake. I am also uncomfortable
at a sequence from the endgame which sees hired natives fleeing from a totem
that we can breeze right past – without being able to ask them what the problem
is, it smacks of “unenlightened natives” a little bit. (To be clear, I don’t
accuse Pederson or Søndergaard of being malicious or racist here, especially
since there were plenty of stories like this in the 80s and before. I know a
little of the history of British imperialism and exploration, though, enough to
know how truly gross and damaging these ideas can get when they are employed
maliciously.)
Treasure Hunt in the Amazon is not breaking new ground, of
course. It’s so old it’s got a Kilroy Was Here joke in it. But it’s competently
done, bug-free as far as I saw, and it’s nice to play an old-fashioned text
adventure without the old-fashioned obstacles. The colonialism is a big caveat
that comes with recommending this, but I’d still like to see more classic
adventures updated in this style.
Reviewed by Thomas Mack
“Treasure Hunt in the Amazon” is a revision of an interactive-fiction game
released in 1985. While it’s interesting as an artifact from that era, the
old-school design of the original game makes it difficult to enjoy for its own
merits.
Gameplay: The original game was squarely in the first generation
of interactive fiction games, and the updated version preserves the hallmarks of
games from that era: a desultory plot, unfair randomness throughout, harsh
inventory limits, hunger and sleep timers, and so on. Keeping those features in
is an entirely reasonable design to choice to make, but the author kindly
provided options to disable them for modern players. (I appreciated them, having
died four moves into the game in my first attempt.) There are puzzles throughout
the game, but gameplay is more about exploring the setting and managing
supplies. As such, turning off the randomizer and removing the various timers
substantially change the player’s experience. In either case, the game itself is
simple: use inventory objects to kill off a few animals, use other inventory
objects to solve some basic puzzles, and then grab the treasure. 4/10.
Mechanics: Even knowing that the game is a remake of one from the mid-80s, I
find it difficult to put up with the most egregious features of interactive
fiction from that era. Some of those can be turned off, but the game also
contains a maze and a few bizarre, unmotivated puzzles (for example, killing a
jaguar and eating it in order to find a key that’s in its stomach for some
reason). 3/10.
Presentation: Like most games from that era, descriptions
are sparse throughout. One typical room description, for example, is simply,
“The ruin consits of a of a few walls here and there. There is some graffiti on
one wall.” The Amazon could be an evocative environment, but the description of
a jaguar is the terse, “It is a huge jaguar. Unfortunately, it looks very
hungry.” The cartoons in the game, however, are entertaining. 4/10.
You might
be interested in this game if: You’d like to try a Danish interactive fiction
game from the mid-80s.
Score: 4
Reviewed by Breakfast Club
This is apparently an update of an adventure game from way, way back, so the
aesthetics are pretty old-school: descriptions are sparse and shallow, and the
story itself feels almost incidental to the game's overall puzzle. Most of the
staples of the bad old days have been pulled out of the basic game and made into
optional challenges, which seems like a pretty neat way of doing things.
As
a game, it's fairly unremarkable. There are a couple of places where it can be
made unwinnable, but it's fairly easy overall, so that's probably not going to
be an issue. The real challenge would probably lie in finishing the story with
one or more of the old-school challenges in play.
As a breakfast, it's bubble-and-squeak: a reworking of yesterday's
leftovers, it's really all about what you put into it.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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