Tombs & Treasure (NES) Playthrough
158A playthrough of Infocom's 1991 adventure game for the NES, Tombs & Treasure.
Tombs & Treasure for the NES is an obscure little cart with an incredibly impressive heritage. It's a Compile-developed remake of Asteka II: Taiyou no Shinden, a 1986 Falcom game created for Japanese PCs that was localized and published in North America by Infocom. That's a whole lot of top-tier talent to be concentrated in a single game.
(If you aren't familiar, Compile was responsible for Zanac, The Guardian Legend, and the Puyo and Aleste series. Falcom created Ys and The Legend of Heroes, and Infocom was behind the Zork games.)
It's a PC-style point-and-click adventure game set in Chichen Itza. The famous archeologist Professor Imes has been searching the ruined city for the Sun Key, a relic that he believes is the literal "key to the Mayans and all their knowledge, power, and wealth."
He and his team have gone missing, but their guide, José, manages to escape and reaches out to the doctor's daughter for help. She agrees and asks you, the player character, to come with her to the site.
Once you get there, Chichen Itza is wide open to you, and there are several temples dotted around the overworld that you can visit. These temples are where you'll search for the clues that'll drive the adventure, and you do all of your poking, prodding, and puzzle solving through a verb-driven point-and-click interface. There are plenty riddles and inventory-based puzzles to work your way through, as well as a few situations that will require the specific talents of one of your companions.
There are also several RPG-style battle scenes, but they're fancy progression gates masquerading as RPG mechanics. If you've solved all of the puzzles and have the weapons the game deems necessary to move on, you'll be able to defeat the monster easily. If you haven't, the enemy will rip you apart. It gives the appearance of a freeform adventure, but Tombs & Treasure is a very straightforward and linear experience.
And it's a difficult one. There's a lot of blind clicking and trial-and-error involved, but it's certainly beatable without a guide so long as you have some patience and the game's documentation on-hand.
The game shows its roots as an 80s PC game in how much it relies on the printed materials that came in the box. The manual features a lengthy excerpt from the Professor's journal, and the game fully expects that you to familiarize yourself with its contents. Without the guidance it provides, you're going to get frustrated trying to blindly stumble your way through. There is also a map that you'll want to keep handy, as it not only shows the general layout of the world, but also the exact location of each area's entrance.
Tombs & Treasures isn't the only console release of its era to lean so heavily on its printed materials, but it does date the game pretty badly. If you can get over that initial hump, though, the game is solid. The exotic, real world inspired setting is a cool novelty, the illustrations are nicely done, and the graphics and music are both up to Compile's usual gold-star standard.
The puzzles are fairly straightforward once you figure out what you need to do, but the cumbersome interface slows things down. There are way too many icons to cycle through, and the game can be irritatingly picky about which commands it'll accept in certain spots. I mean, is it really necessary to have separate commands for push, pull, and move? Just another sign of the game's roots, I suppose. I think I've been spoiled by the advances made in UI design over the past thirty years.
As long as you aren't too put off by its "legacy features," Tombs & Treasures is a unique take on the adventure genre that makes for a fun way to sink a couple of afternoons.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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