Golden Treasure: The Great Green Review for Mac

Golden Treasure: The Great Green interactive RPG releases today, June 17th, by developer Dreaming Door Studios. You, the player, shed your human skin to take the form of a dragon (or, as you call yourself in the game, a Draak-Kin) and explore the world through the eyes of a newly hatched, powerful creature that desires to learn all about your environment and command what is rightfully yours, as a mighty Draak-Kin.

Essentially a choose your own adventure RPG, Golden Treasure: The Great Green allows you to fully step into the mindset of a hatchling dragon and grow into your own worthiness and strength through trial and failure. From the moment the game begins, you start influencing what type of dragon you will become. Inside your egg, you start gathering affinities for the elements (Earth, Fire, Water, and Air), which will control your future abilities, dictating what strengths you can use when you encounter different challenges in your journey.

You cannot master all four elements at once, so you must choose if you want to focus on sturdiness, power, intelligence, or agility, or have a mediocre amount of all four, or a mix. With the skill sets you gain you hunt, trick other animals, gather treasures, and try to understand these mysterious “No-Tails” creatures that threaten your existence and seem to be able to take down even the strongest of Draak-Kins…

Golden Treasure: The Great Green is an appealing game with an original, exciting story that begs to be uncovered and delved into. Full of rich lore, as a small dragon you get to meet all sorts of creatures all connected in spirit and singing. You get to decide whether to make mentors or enemies, or food or friends of other animals, learning more about the way everything operates around you as you go. There are labyrinths to navigate, treasures to track down, and areas to discover.

Reaching these milestones, however, are interlaced with repetitive necessities of survival. Even a Draak-Kin so great as you falls prey to hunger, fatigue, and sickness, and so as you explore your territory you must take care of these nags. Even though Golden Treasure: The Great Green attempts to make it fun every time you go out and hunt, after a while it gets monotonous. You must spend an entire day hunting to fill your stomach, making it feel that you wasted a whole sun eating when you could have been exploring more. Although the dynamics of the hunt shift with different game to chase, the misuse of time lingers.

Combat can also become repetitive after a while, yet such is the case for all turn-based combat. The use of the four elements adds a level of strategy to defeat your opponent, as well as learning about different styles creatures have to fight, but in the end if you focus on one element only, you might not fair well in aggressive encounters.

This leads to another negative of Golden Treasure: The Great Green: death. With only three lives, and many ways to fail, the game makes it easy to lose your progress and specialized story line in just a few swipes. Deciding how large of a negative this is is hard to decide, as such is life: if you fail to a large degree, you die, and Golden Treasure: The Great Green stresses the circle of life in almost all scenes. To fault Golden Treasure: The Great Green for staying true to itself might be slightly unfair.

The beauty of Golden Treasure: The Great Green, however, is unquestionably breathtaking. With hand-painted depictions of scenery, animals, and life in general, Golden Treasure: The Great Green makes the magic come to life and generates a feeling of fantasy that rivals the best fairy tales.

Golden Treasure: The Great Green is worth playing just to marvel at the paintings.

All in all, difficulty, frustrating repetition, and high potential of story loss aside, Golden Treasure: The Great Green has many redeeming qualities that saves it from being a boring game where you are just a dragon that can destroy everything in your path. You learn, discover, adapt, and unearth. An endlessly replayable great game with just a few bad aspects, Golden Treasure: The Great Green is a solid play that deserves applause.

End score: 8/10

Check Out the Golden Treasure: The Great Green Trailer:

Golden Treasure: The Great Green releases today for PC and Mac via Steam.