Traps n Treasures

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The year is... 1671! You are a pirate named Flynn and the evil Red-Beard captured your entire crew as prisoners and stole your entire loot! It is now up to you, to rescue your friends and take back your treasures. Flynn sets off to get even with the evil pirate, by leaping across all four levels of the Devil's Island, collecting treasures and power ups on the way. The story-line is pretty basic since there must be about some hundreds of similar platform games out there, but the emphasis of the game here is given on the puzzles rather than thundering through the levels in as little time as possible. It involves plenty of switching levers and shunting blocks to progress. The game consists of four massive levels: the Threadneedle Lagoon, the Skull Grotto, The Temple and the Fortress, each swarmed by enemies and including puzzles, traps and ...secret rooms! You may even get involved into a spot of gambling with shopkeepers if you fancy your chances as a dice "master" in order to earn more money and buy better weapon upgrades!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Although the graphics look a bit "old" even for a mid 90s game, there are plenty of colors and details splashed about without inducing any eye strain...! The tiny sprites look great and do not visually mess up with the backgrounds, so the chances of sudden death from hidden "baddies" are almost zero. Although there are no fancy parallax scrolling techniques here, the game looks cool with nice (and funny sometimes) level details (underwater scenes, castles etc) along with smooth sprite animations. The game offers no less than 64 color on screen! Of note is the presence of some nice, sampled ambient sound effects and some pretty good in-game short tunes. What is really impressive here is the way the sound is enabled based on what you do during the game. I mean, when you run and jump on the platforms, only ambient sounds (such as wind, sea-waves etc) are playing but when you jump into the sea and start diving, the ambient sounds are disabled and a mellow underwater tune starts to play!