Original Release: NLT Media, 2020, PC
Other Releases: Android / iOS / Linux (2021)
A throwback adventure-dating sim that has you combing a jungle island for treasure, and stands out with an abundance of professionally rendered artwork
Treasure of Nadia (PC, NLT Media, 2020)
Where to Buy: Free demo at Itch.io, full (paid) version available from Steam or Patreon
Review by: Master-B
One of the bigger names in indy “adult” gaming of the last couple years, Treasure of Nadia is an RPG Maker game that’s unusual for the whole RPG Maker oeuvre. Aside from a better-than-usual level of overall polish, it’s also not really an RPG; more of a combination of adventure game and visual novel/dating sim shoehorned into the RPG Maker engine. The most RPG-like element is the appearance of occasional Lufia 2-style bombing and block-pushing puzzles. No combat or leveling or anything like that.
The other element of secret sauce is that the mysterious creator is apparently a professional 3D rendered graphics designer with significant experience, so the game benefits from a more professional look than most. In-game that means portrait art that looks like the style used in slot machines, but the big selling point is the cornucopia of rendered sex scenes. These are actually done quite well, looking like something that would have been in a high-budget game circa the PS1 and PS2 eras. There are a whole lot too; the version I downloaded was a little over 3 GB, and 2.6 GB of that was the sex movies!
Our quest puts us in the shoes of the son of famous adventurer Idaho Johnson, who has just passed away under mysterious circumstances. We take charge of Idaho’s ramshackle little home on a tropical island, with the initial goal of simply earning funds to renovate the place and make it suitable to bring tourist and island ladies back to. But our means of making money is illegally digging up native artifacts in the nearby national park lands, and that process gradually spins into a surprisingly complex quest involving a fabulous hidden treasure and various shady forces competing for it.
Your first step in this quest should be to turn the “autorun everywhere” setting off in the main menu, as it makes it too difficult to enter narrow passageways. Then you get adjusted to the core gameplay loop, which is pretty simple but keeps you going just by having a lot of stuff in the hopper at any given time. You’re mostly poking about the jungle area looking for artifacts to dig up (which refresh randomly when you change screens), but you’ll soon discover Metroidvania-esque obstacles that require you to obtain new items and trigger new plot developments to pass. A lot of that involves exploring the town and its various locations as well.
So other than visual-noveling around in this manner, with breaks for the occasional Lufia-style puzzle, there isn’t much going on other than a simplistic fishing mini-game (which basically just has you figure out the right lure for each fish type and refresh the screen until the one you’re after shows up). It does have the traditional visual novel style of sometimes having you comb the available environments for random unpredictable changes to trigger a series of events, but this is actually easier here than in most VNs due to the small size of the game environment, how fast your character runs about and the fact that new events almost always pop off automatically when you enter the right screen.
Plenty of “adult content” is scattered in the midst of this process as well. Ostensibly you’re supposed to be improving your bachelor pad to get the nookie, but our hapless hero also gets more than enough thrown his way automatically as part of the ongoing story. The content is largely pretty vanilla hetero; no loli stuff, no violence, no weird curveballs except for what appears to be an incest subplot that looks like it was kinda sloppily converted to Not Mom and Not Sister to allow the game to be listed on Steam. A good thing regardless of any pressure applied by digital platforms, however, I think the “free” tube sites have really corrupted the youth with this stuff, it’s a little worrisome to think how many people are now wandering around wanting to bang immediate family they live with. But that’s who pays the bills these days apparently, the Not Sister bit is rewritten capably so that it appears to be a childhood friend of the protag and doesn’t end up off-putting, but the Not Mom stuff … yeesh. Writer really had a thing for this and really went in on it, and if you’re not into it the periodic flare-ups of it really jerk you out of an otherwise light and innocuous romp.
That aside, this really is a pretty decent little intrigue / treasure hunt story that is kinda a throwback to old-school adventure serials mixed with sophomoric sex content that’s a throwback to the Leisure Suit Larry / Spellcasting days (though entirely more hardcore than those games ever were). The occasional cringey interruption of XVideos front page “not mom sneaks into not son’s room!!” stuff isn’t really enough to derail the whole experience, and I’d say the game is worth a look if you’re into adventure game/VN structures and competently rendered ero scenes. Should also run on an absolute potato. All that said I only played up to the end of the Itch.io demo and don’t know if it gets sexually weirder later on.
An extended demo is available via Itch.io that lets you play about half the base game (about 15 hours of playtime), then you’ll have to turn to Patreon or Steam as it’s one of those continually updated things with a new small chapter released every couple of weeks or so.
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