I’m purchasing an Xbox Live Indie Game (XBLIG) every day, seeking out the quality titles that got lost in the shuffle and are not well represented in the top 50 lists on the Xbox Dashboard. Today is day #152, and today’s game is “Treasure Treasure: FFEE”.
Treasure Treasure: FFEE (“FFEE” standing for Fortress Forage Extra Edition) is a puzzle platformer in the vein of classic Game Boy-era games. But where some games would be content to mimic GB-era gameplay, and maybe offer a pixelated look, TT:FFEE takes the opposite approach, by copying Game Boy-era graphics (to the point of actually making the screen look like a Game Boy, complete with what a classic Sega Game Gear ad once derided as “creamed spinach colour” graphics), but offering two-player gameplay that’s superior to any GB platformer I ever played (link cable, or no link cable). The game smartly swaps to split screen whenever your two characters are too far apart, and merges it back together when each is close at hand. And though this is intended as a two-person game, it can be played by just one (juggling back and forth between the characters).
First, from the developer:
“A two-player puzzle platformer recently released on Xbox Live Indie Games! Grab a friend and work together to blow things up and find treasure!”
A few XBLIG platformers have experimented with optional or mandatory two-player play, but Treasure Treasure does as well as any of them. The core gameplay is collect-’em-up, with you controlling both character to solve puzzles and find all 21 treasures. You can leave the castle at any time, but the game does a good job of incentivising finding all the treasures.
To find all the treasure you’ll have to use one character to literally give the other a leg up, you’ll have to strategically drop bombs, and use each character’s abilities (one is stronger, the other more dexterous).
The presentation, which could have been disastrous (after all, there’s a reason we moved on from creamed spinach coloured graphics) comes off as cute rather than annoying, and the gameplay is solid. The game could be longer, but for 80 Microsoft Points it’s not hard to get your dollar’s worth out of this, despite the lack of replay value once you’ve finally found all 21 treasures. And pay attention to the text at the end of the game, as it regales you with details about each of the treasures you manages to rescue during that play through, there’s a lot of humour injected into those descriptions. This is an unusual example of a relatively short game that’s sufficiently memorable that you’ll be telling people about it for a while to come after completing it.
Click here to download “Treasure Treasure: FFEE”, and then please come back after playing to rate the game.
Know someone else who would want to read the review, or rate the game? “Share This” and invite them to.
Writings of Mass Deduction 