Grade: A-
Beautifully illustrated text-based adventure game where you embody a dragon
For about 1.5 months now, I’ve been working on Golden Treasure: The Great Green. It’s a game I thought would be a short text-based adventure but ended up spanning hours and hours of content. Hundreds of hand-drawn scenes, three massive open-world areas, labyrinths, artifacts and secrets, and a complete combat system create a whole world to explore.
In “The Great Green,” you roleplay as a dragon hatchling coming to life and finding its place in the world. The game is 95% “choose your own adventure” illustrated novel and 5% game. At first, I was super intimidated by the walls of text coming my way. The words on the screen were incredibly flowery and descriptive and felt more like reading a novel than playing a game. In addition, many of the game poems are wrapped in a vague conceptual language, which my attention span has trouble wrapping my head around.
For example, in 5-7 paragraphs of religiously worded text, the author goes into great detail about your dragon hunger being akin to something like Manifest Destiny, where you, the dragon, are the “eater of the world.” The world is there for you as the apex predator, and your job is to take and eat it.
Survival is hard in the wild
I was digging that vibe of being an apex predator, but then reality crashed in for this dragon hatchling. In your first scenario, the “No-tails,” or humans, had killed mama dragon Bambi style. If you choose to burn the humans, you get killed right out of the gate. The game is incredibly unforgiving that way. There are dozens upon dozens of ways to die. I was killed exploring a tomb, fighting another dragon, not showing proper courtesy to my elder dragon friend, hunting an animal that was too powerful for me, and starving. You ruthlessly feel the struggle of wilderness survival in this game.
If you die, you get to reset the day, and it’s framed as a “dream” where you are warned of dangerous choices ahead. If you fail three times, though, it’s the “real death,” and you are forced to restart the game. You get to keep all your knowledge and info you gained from the prior rounds, though.
Elemental Powers
Dragons, in this world, are all elemental creatures, and you can lean into different types of four elements in different ways to get combat and RP abilities. Fire = strength/power. Water = stealth/wisdom, Air = quickness/intelligence, and Earth = Toughness. As you grow up, your physical color and design are also determined by these elemental leanings.
The fighting goes much better if you match your strengths to another creature’s weaknesses.
Choose your own adventure vignettes
The mini-adventures throughout are gorgeous and memorable as you explore the world. You get to see the world through a dragon’s eyes. In one vignette, you come across a bunch of squirrels fighting with woodpeckers for dominion over a tree. The dragon’s choices are to side with team squirrel, side with team woodpecker, walk away, or lastly, burn down the tree and kill all of these annoying lesser creatures who would dare to bother you with their petty squabbles. Choosing “dragon” like choices raises how your kin see you. Choosing more merciful alternatives often leads your kin rating to go down.
It’s one of the central RP elements of the game. How “dragon” will you be? Each choice has the potential to impact your elemental leanings as well.
End game takes patience and persistence.
I got to part 2 consistently and grew up to be an adolescent dragon. But, even then, I never quite figured out how to ramp up the combat skills to survive competition with other dragons. There were no-holds-barred-survival-of-the-fittest scenes where you’d encounter other adolescents of the great green, and each time, they destroyed me without mercy. I realized when reading some walkthroughs that I’d need to play through the first part of the game many times and build up some combat skills. It’s like a rogue-like in that sense. But, eventually, you get powerful enough through persistence/grind to win out on these adolescent battles and proceed further to the end-game.
After a few times through the first map, I stopped having fun replaying the text-based content I’d already gone through and decided to hang it up there.
The Great Green is a well-written, beautifully illustrated text-based adventure game.
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