Odyssey #2: Treasure Island is an interactive text adventure from 1980 by Joel Mick & James Taranto and it is the second game in Joel Mick’s Odyssey series. The majority of the game does take place on an island and while there is a pirate, a ship, and treasure, the similarities between itself and Robert Louis Stevenson’s treasure island end there.
There are a few things that immediately stood out to me while playing Mick’s Treasure Island. The co-author in this second game, James Taranto, is different than Mick’s co-author in Damsel in Distress; Jeffrey M. Richter. I am making the assumption that they helped Mick with the machine coding. There are some minor nuances in the parser between the first and second games in the Odyssey series. If you wanted to move around in Damsel in Distress for example, like in most other text adventure games, you could type GO NORTH to move north. Treasure Island’s parser does not recognize this command. If you want to move around in Treasure Island you can only type in the direction you want to move in or a letter. So NORTH or N to move north. It seems such a minor detail, but after having played dozens of interactive text adventures this change in format kept throwing me off. I also felt that it impacted any feeling of continuity or consistency within the series.
The second thing that stood out to me was that I felt that Joel Mick took a step backwards in terms of plot or gameplay. In the first game in this series, Damsel in Distress, there was an actual plot and conscientious move away from the treasure hunt trope that Mick used in Burial Ground Adventure. You were attempting to rescue a kidnapped princess. Here in Treasure Island, we’ve returned to finding treasures scattered around the island and depositing them in a plane to obtain a score. It was a bit of a surprise.
The third thing to stand out was the character whose shoes you were stepping into. In Damsel in Distress I wrote that I was mortified at having to kill a royal messenger in the beginning of that game. Here in Treasure Island the game begins with a man dying who is sitting next to you in an airport diner. What do you do? You rummage through his pockets, find a key, and take it. You take that key to a nearby locker and you find a crossword puzzle, a pilot’s suit, and a shovel. Inside a pocket in the pilot’s suit is a treasure map. We then go about “stealing” a plane. There is also a newsstand within the airport where we obtain a Hustler magazine. When you type in READ MAGAZINE the response that you get is; I GET HARD. So there is an attempt at adult humor while for the second game in a row you can’t help but raise questions about the morality of the character in the game you’re portraying. In a later part of the game, while on the island, actions you take make it appear as if you’ve decapitated an individual. I am certainly no saint; but I just wanted to point out that an interesting aspect of this questionable morality is that it serves to make the game a bit more difficult for some. We hesitate to type in amoral behavior or in some cases don’t even think about doing so. This was the case in Damsel in Distress. It took me about thirty minutes into the game until I begrudgingly typed in; KILL MESSENGER.
The fourth thing to stand out is that Treasure Island is a much more difficult game than Damsel in Distress. There are a few key puzzles in the game that will take you a little while to work through. The “tall” wall of the fort, the “impassable” ravine & the crossword puzzle, making your way onto the pirate ship, and lastly finding BOTH treasures on the pirate ship. None of the puzzles violate my fair play rules and YOU WILL work your way through them. The author toys with the player a bit regarding certain objects that you find. When you discover a chair and a ladder in the game, it is not hard to deduce why those objects have been placed in the game. However WHERE you end up using those items ends up different from where I initially guessed and tried. I was even so certain about how they were to be used I spent some time experimenting with different verbs and commands because I thought it was a parser issue and not a wrong guess on my part. The ladder and how it is used a couple of different ways is reminiscent of having to get to different areas of the game as in Hassett’s Curse of the Sasquatch.
Crossing the ravine is probably the most difficult puzzle to overcome in the game. The crossword puzzle will help you in this endeavor which is itself a puzzle you need to work through. It reads:
ACROSS
- SLEIGHT OF HAND
- TYPE OF PUZZLE
The solution is quite clever.
Getting on board the pirate ship will also involve you having to solve two different puzzles or find two different things. I have to give a tip of the cap to Joel Mick for the puzzles and difficulty level of this game compared to his other offerings. Mick may have reintroduced the “treasure hunt trope” however the puzzles to overcome in the game were genuine.
I was able to play all the way through Treasure Island without any help but that would not be the case with Mick’s third entry in this series which I’ll cover in my next blog post. The Odyssey games by Joel Mick are hard to find but if you can do so I encourage you to try these first two games. If you’re a text adventure aficionado you’ll be glad that you did.