This is a difficult review for me to write. I played Treasure Adventure Game way back in the day, many years ago, and I loved it--for a small game, it had a lot of heart, and a lot of drive behind it. It made some very smart, and some very good decisions; I won't say it was a classic, but I enjoyed it, and I remember hearing about Treasure Adventure World, and being excited about it for quite some time before it slipped off of my radar. I ended up getting it years later, where it sat in my backlog until recently. I'd only made a couple of passes at starting it, and gave up at the time... for reasons that will become apparent.
I cannot recommend this game. As much as I enjoyed TAG, and as much as TAW... sort of won me over, as there is plenty to like here, I can say with confidence I have rarely had a more miserable time in a game, at least not that I can remember. I can see some of the same heart here, some of the same care, but everything about this game, everything from the ground up, feels designed fully to make your experience as a player miserable. Just off the top of my head, the exploration and secret finding gets old quick. Exploring every new island for the first time is pretty fun, but the fun is short lived before you hit a roadblock, have to turn back or move forwards to another island, and try elsewhere. And I know, I know; I am aware this is a Metroidvania. But you don't understand.
The progress gating is ridiculous. I loaded a save just yesterday, to realize I was over 40% done with the game, and could not have guessed anywhere even close to that number for a prize. Island after island after island, treasure after treasure after treasure, it's the same thing that happens. You walk in, find out you can't do something, and come back later with it, but the big upgrades are scarcely noticeable. It took me most of the game before I got a slightly higher jump than before, and it never ever feels like as major an upgrade as the game's main item, as I would call it--the Magic Bottle. In fact, I can't really measure major steps of progression that I made almost anywhere in the game outside of the Bottle, and when you first get your ship. The high jump feels more like being able to get past tiny little annoying barriers to entry than an increase in mobility, like the insultingly just-slightly-too-tall jumps can now be handled for little purpose; the sprint comes very late, and feels exclusively useful in the room you get it in; even items like the Shark Repellent barely stand out. I got the quest and finished the quest for the Shark Repellent before I ever needed it, and it felt strangely out of place to me, a solution that never gave me a puzzle.
Throughout the game, progress is gates in one of two ways. You either find an item that lets you go forward, or you solve a puzzle, and both of these components had major issues through my entire play time. For starters, item gating is never really spelled out for you; you're never clearly told or shown that you can't quite get past an area because of an item, it's never truly made clear which path you need to go through save for a few rare occasions, and so you might be tempted to wander and experience some side content that might or might not be rewarding. And for the puzzles, a lot of it is rinse and repeat; the puzzles are often designed to punish you with a redo, many times which you'll need to leave and come back to engage yourself, and the myriad spike traps are also just there to encourage waiting. All in all, both of the game's main systems are here basically to punish you and waste your time for every little mistake you make--whether it's going in the wrong room first, pushing a block the wrong way once, or even diverting to an entire island you won't be able to handle for eight more hours. It is frustrating, and the reward the game gives you for playing cannot keep up with the penalties of fighting through these areas multiple times in a row.
And lastly, but perhaps most importantly of all, are the controls. The game's movement is very sluggish, very floaty... at times it'll feel like you're moving around on ice, and that's regardless of where you're walking, if you're diving, if you're controlling a boat, or even if you're flying through the air on a vehicle. You WILL take damage and fall sometimes without the precise control needed for some parts, and it will never ever feel good, and very rarely will it feel like it's your fault.
Truth be told, I really hate to come down hard on this game because it and its predecessor both still hold a special place in my heart, but I can't truly be honest if I say anything but that I had so, so many rough moments where I genuinely hated playing this game. There is some good art, some good music, and some good direction here, but the game is built on a fundamentally flawed core, and polish with an amateur hand in too many places. And I can see why so few people have even the earliest achievements in this game, and why it was so hard for me to take the dive.
Maybe playing this game so close after Hollow Knight simply made these game design errors stand out more to me--or stand out at all--but after playing such a tight game and having a better and easier time even in its most difficult modes, it was all too easy to notice my growing frustration. As I said, I cannot recommend this game in good conscience.
