Have you ever played a video game, where you are convinced there’s a good game in there somewhere – maybe even a great game – it’s just that you can’t quite reach it? That you can’t connect with it, despite your best efforts. The game in question does enough to convince you something brilliant is coming and it’s right around the corner, but you never actually reach it. It’s like the developers have constructed a veritable wall of nonsensical game mechanics, a moat of lacklustre tutorials, and a maze of unappealing level design, to stop you from finding the good game hidden within. Well, Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is that game.
Set before the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic adventure story Treasure Island, Flint: Treasures of Oblivion follows the escapades of the eponymous Captain Flint. Taking place in the 17th century, during the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy’, Treasure of Oblivion really does deliver on all of the Piratey shenanigans that anyone could ask for. Double crosses, betrayals, parrots and peg legs, this certainly ticks all the boxes that a fandom brought up on Pirates of the Caribbean movies could ask for. Storyline-wise, this is a fairly standard tale interestingly told.
Thanks to the expertly drawn comic book panels and speech bubbles that crop up during gameplay, Treasure of Oblivion rather nostalgically brings to mind the much-underrated Sega comic-inspired beat ‘em up Comix Zone; though without the fourth wall-breaking which defined that 1995 classic. As a big fan of comic books, I found this stylish method of storytelling immensely engaging, even if the narrative itself was a tired amalgam of a stereotypical pirate yarn.
Played from an isometric viewpoint, Treasure of Oblivion is ostensibly a strategy RPG, though, unfortunately, Savage Level have rather over-sugared the rum. Shoved into your standard TBS mechanics are card collection – to power your crews’ abilities – and dice rolling – to decide who hits who. Sure, many strategy games involve secret dice rolling, influenced by various factors, to determine if your soldier hits an enemy with their sword, say, but in Treasure of Oblivion that roll is blatant, even going so far as to animate the dice for your benefit.
The effect is that everything feels completely random, with too few opportunities for players to impact the outcome in any meaningful way. The combination of cards, dice, and turn based combat, makes the gameplay cluttered and confusing, which is further hindered by terrible tutorials that fail to sufficiently explain how all these mechanics work individually and collectively. Worse, the terrible fiddly controls, on console at least, add to the frustration. In short, I won combat encounters, but I was never really sure how or why.
Visually Treasure of Oblivion is nice enough to look at but does a poor job of signposting where you should be going, leading to wandering around the mostly linear levels clicking on the environment until you find something to interact with. Frame rate drops and minor bugs abound, leading to the sense that this pirate game needed a little more time before it emerged from the depths of development.