Treasures of the Aegean Reviews

An open-ended Metroidvania-esque tomb raiding platformer with a time loop twist, and a great way to spend six or seven hours. It looks good, plays well, tickles the exploration and puzzle-solving part of your brain without taxing it too much, and is sensible enough not to outstay its welcome. Extremely solid and enjoyable game.

Treasures of the Aegean is an exploration game with a good emphasis on movement and platforming, featuring great artworks, environments, music and an interesting story. You get you full move set from the get go and are free to roam around the whole island, there are actually a few powers you can acquire during your playthrough but they're more small quality of life things, nothing is ability gated. The island is pretty huge so it feels like you're aimlessly wandering around picking up collectibles at first, but with the map completing itself after each loop, as long as you are diligent with map annotations, you'll quickly get a grasp of where you are going, places you still need to visit, and what to do. I liked that each loop made you start in a random point of the island, encouraging you to explore new places. The movement is fluid and pleasurable, your character is quick and perfectly able to parkour through its environment. I liked the features that can be exploited to conserve momentum like sliding or automatically climbing one block tall obstacles. Only thing that was a little off for me was the wall climbing that felt like it wasn't triggering consistently at times but I'm nitpicking here. I had a very good time overall with Treasures of the Aegean and would heartily recommend it !

La mejor forma de describirlo que se me ocurre es: "princeofpersia-vania indianajonesco". Tiene de todo lo que me gusta y un poco más también, es tremendo plataformero con puzzles y todavía me queda mucho por descubrir. Edit: es un juegazo, lo acabo de completar al 100% con la profecía y todos los tesoros. Hay un par de cuestiones que podrían mejorar pero en líneas generales es super disfrutable y recontra satisfactorio terminarlo, me lo guardo para una review en Youtube!

The game is fascinating, however the crashes are really annoying. Be sure to test on your playing platform first. ------------------------------- After completing the game: Though the game still crashed randomly, luckily one loop will only last for about 15 minutes and it did not crash very often. So the situation was indeed annoying but not critical. If you love 2D platform game, or long for a treasure hunting on an ancient island, this game is certainly for you. But based on the length and the volume of the game's core contents, I recommend to buy this on sale. Besides, although you might find some of the collectibles are hard to find. You could always ask the developers for help and they are really warm-hearted guys.

This game is dope. 2D Mirror's Edge with Uncharted/Indiana Jones and really great puzzles all wrapped up in a time loop. Please play it. It's been a while since I enjoyed a game so much!

Found this game during Steam Next Fest October 2021 and loved the demo. Just under three years later ( 😱) I finally got around to playing it. The game is an [B]eccentric take on the metroidvania/rogue-lite genre[/B], adding a [B]time-loop mechanic[/B] to the usual platforming, collecting and map-exploration - the player only gets between 15 and 25 minutes per loop to explore (finding collectibles extends the loop-time), but retains information and the map from the previous runs. The [B]starting location on the map is randomized for each loop[/B] (within the parts of the map that have already been explored / uncovered). For the first ten loops, there are also special stages, which are not connected to the main game map and serve to illustrate a part of the story, which is largely told in flashback sequences. The [B]map is very large and detailed[/B], with 110 unique collectibles to find and dozens of puzzles to solve, some of which require finding and carrying items from one part of the map to another. To make this fun, the game implements a [B]wonderfully smooth and flowing movement system[/B] that lets the player-character run, climb and jump their way through the map really fast with really easy controls (on game controllers, haven't tried with mouse/kb). There are a enemies on the map, but they are few and far between and really only serve to slow the player down on occasion - [B]the player character cannot actually die[/B] either and brushes off both getting shot (thanks to a bullet-proof vest) or falling too large a distance (because ... she's just that much of a badass?) with ease. But recovering does cost a whole minute on the loop timer and that becomes significant as the game progresses and some of the puzzles require quite a bit of time and travel to solve - and it needs to be done before the loop strikes and resets the puzzle state. The game's [B]art-style deserves a special mention for successfully adapting the "Ligne Claire" style of Franco-Belgian 20th century comic albums[/B] into a video game. Due to its unique design choices, [B]this game might not be for everyone[/B]. Among the things that will irritate anybody looking for either a traditional metroidvania or a linear platformer: * [B]Forced non-linear exploration[/B] due to the "time-loop", which really is a time-limit plus a randomized starting location * A [B]huge[/B] map without any metroidvania-style skill-gates. Exploring the entire place first and then [B]remembering where to go to do what is an explicit part of the challenge[/B] in this game. * A "semi-automatic" mapping system, which does reveal the game's world as the player explores it and saves the state across loops, [B]but does not automatically mark collectibles, items and locations[/B]. Instead, the mapping screen provides a plethora of symbols that the player can use to make their own marks on the map, which are also preserved through loops. * Complete focus on exploration, navigation and puzzle-solving: [B]The player character is unarmed and can neither shoot nor fight[/B]. However, [B]I had an absolute blast[/B] with this game, 100%-ed it immediately on the first playthrough (in roughly 12 hours of playtime) and it's now the latest entry in my "All Time Favorites" category of my Steam library.

I don't know if it is just because I am using a controller instead of the keyboard but these controls infuriate me and make gameplay more tedious than fun

This is the perfect example of why simplicity can give you better game than over-complicated system. its a 2d platformer with a pretty big map, and you just explore it, finding piece of story here and there, collectible, and puzzle that are fairly easy. I wish this game was bigger or that there was more similar game cause its just so fun to move around and find stuff

Treasures of the Aegean is a decent metroidvania with an annoying time loop feature that drags it down. Luckily the rest of the game is good enough to make it worth putting up with, but it would be a much better game without the time loop. You play as Marie, who's an ex-mercenary turned treasure hunter joining her academic friend on an expedition to Crete, where a volcanic eruption unveils long-lost secrets of the Minoan civilization. But after 15 minutes, the volcano blows up in such a massive explosion, it destroys the entire world. Then the game resets and you get to explore the island from the beginning again. The automap fills out while you explore and shows you which areas you've already been to in previous runs, but this game-resetting time loop feature is still annoying. Metroidvanias are supposed to be about open exploration at the player's own pace, and the sense of urgency added by the timer doesn't fit to this style of gameplay. Especially since there are plenty of Tomb Raider style jumping and block-pulling puzzles around that take a while to figure out. On your explorations, you will discover ancient artifacts (which increase the timer: the more artifacts you find, the more time you have on later runs) and special quest items required to solve puzzles. You can acquire new abilities by freeing the spirits of ancient Minoan priestesses, which requires finding three gemstones and bringing them to the right place. But you have to find all three gemstones in the same run, as your quest items will vanish from the inventory after the reset. As you slowly figure out what you need to do, the final challenge is to solve three major puzzles in the same run (which lasts, at most, 20 minutes!) to find the ending. I greatly enjoyed the puzzles themselves, and the environments were quite varied. There are plenty of different areas to explore: shipwrecks of an Ottoman fleet, Minoan tombs, palaces, residential districts, a whale graveyard filled with giant bones. The art is beautiful and a joy to behold. The core platforming gameplay works decently enough; I've played games with smoother controls, but Treasures of the Aegean plays well enough that the controls were never a problem. Overall, it was an enjoyable game with beautiful art, an interesting story, and solid core gameplay of platforming and puzzle solving. I just would have liked it even more if it weren't for that stupid time loop system, which took me a long time to get used to, and even when I got used to it, it was merely bearable, not good.

I feel really bad for this developer. From this and SuperEpic it is clear that there is at least one Person in there that has a vision for the games they make. The art is always nice to look at and each game has unique ideas and new mechanics and gimmicks. But the final product is always just a boring mess. Here even though the art looks stunning in screenshots once you move it falls apart. The player model is clearly 3d with textures streched over it and she moves very stiff and looks aweful. If you walk there are constant dust clouds appearing at your feet but they are cut of at clearly visible borders making them just out of place rectangles. Enemy soldiers shoot slow moving bullets at you with hitboxes that hit you even if you are no where near the bullet. There is a timeloop and every time it ends you lose your phone in the past so Atlantis gets more information each time and the map changes each time. Which is a really interesting premis. But it is implemented in a giant empty map that has basically no gameplay to it besides falling down to the deepest spot each time. All the puzzles to open gates are just there to waste your time (literally) since you only have 15 min each loop. The worst offender is that you can't actually safe mid loop. If you have to exit the game half way through the loop you have to find some friendly guards that shoot you to death or else you lose all progress since the start of the loop. Why? They could literally just record what you have done and act like the loop ended right then and there, so you start the next loop that way. Outer Wilds and basically every good timeloop game works that way. They also have an option to skip the current loop if you see that you don't have enough time to do what you want anyway.