Treasures of the Aegean tells the story of Marie Taylor, and her colleague James Andrew, as they explore a recently resurfaced ancient Minoan city. This is, of course, easier said than done, si💙nce the mysterious city also brings with it a time loop that Marie and James get trapped with. Developed by Undercoders, the game is a parkour and precision-based platformer that features 2D comic book-style art as you explore the ancient city of Thera and uncover its secrets.
Undercoders director, David Jaumandreu, took♋ some time to answer some questions about Treasures of the Aegean and how the team built the historical action thriller from the ground up.
Treasures of the Aegean has a unique art style. We’ve seen comic book-style art designs in games before, but Franco-Belgian is a very distinct style of illustration. I asked David why they chose the Franco-Belgian comic book-style aesthetics over other comic book stylings, and if they tested out a⛎ny other design styles in the early stages of development before settling on the final design.
“At the very beginning of development we experimented with pixel art, as we had used it for previous titles such as SuperEpic and Conga Master and it was a logical decision,” David tells me. “However, for Treasures of the Aegean we wanted to achieve a visual style whic🍌h was more unique, that could stand out more and marked a difference from our older titles.
“When searching for references in search of inspiration, we turned to adventure and thriller comics we had read when we were younger and found out that the Bandes Desinés were a perfect fit for what we had in mind: they had strong visuaജls, beautiful landscapes, a frequent use of black lines which would help terrain visibility and, above all, they inspired us adventure and we were r🦂eally familiar with them. We thought it was a perfect fit!”
The game’s art design plays perfectly with the game’s locatio🧜n of the Aegean Islands, which as it turns out, be꧃came the destination of choice purely by chance.
“At the beginning of development, we started working on the idea of a sinking island trapped in a time loop purely from a game mechanics point of view. We𝐆 knew what we wanted to achieve in terms of gameplay, but at that point we didn’t have characters or a lore.
“It was during a leisure trip to the Cyclades islands in the Aegean, especially visiting Santorini and Crete, when we found out t🥂he details of the Minoan culture, the Thera explosion and all the myths surrounding it and found it fascinating. All this story about an incredibly advanced civilization being wiped out by a natural disaster and all the theories that were created around it just captivated us, so we wrote the game’s story based on them.”
There is a lot of historical context in Treasures of the Aeg🧸ean that spans multiple timelines. I asked how much research went into t🐷he Minoan timeline to ensure accuracy, while also striking a good balance between fact and fiction.
“We actually did a lot of research to write the whole story,” says David. “Once we had the outline,🍸 we did a lot of reading on the Minoans and visited runs and historical sites in order to fill in all the gaps of the backstory in a consistent way.
"Once we had that, we turned to Greek Mythology to build some of the characters who are still well known in popular culture and put in a bit of classical fantasy to the mix. On top of that we created our own story, filling the gaps that history has never solved with our own fic☂tion and, of course, all the “present-day” characters that are presented in the story.
“There was a lot of documentation involved also on the aesthetics. We took a lot of references from th🦩e few Minoan murals, pain🔴tings, artifacts, and constructions that have survived to date, in order to create an island that genuinely felt from that era.”
The parkour elements of the gameplay work incredibly well with the massive, open world-style map. Speed is also a necessary mechanic for successfully making it through before the time loop resets everything – a process that w༺as intentional (and diff🐬icult to achieve) when it came to the speed and precision of the gameplay mixed with the time loop mechanic.
“Mechanically speaking, the concept we were chasing from the beginning was that ‘players could fly their way through a huge island’ while enjoying the ride. We wanted to maximize the freedom of movement, in order to favoꦏr exploration, and minimize any barrier that could hinder mobility, so we worked on a character that could flow swiftly through the terrain. And yes, since speed is key to completing the ‘final loop’, once all the mysteries have been solved, we wanted players to be able to move really fast!
“This was quite hard to achieve, not only because of Marie’s moves, but because we wanted to have no loading times that could interrupt the game flow. Having the island dynamically load the terrain as players move at such a high speedꦆ was quite a challenge!”
In my review of the game, I mention that Treasures of the Aegean is very cerebral in that Marie’s “enemies” are the obstacles that she encounters and puzzles that she needs to decipher.ꦫ I asked David if there had ever been any consideration or testing for adding in NPC enemies or combat, who provided a refreshing response.
“No, the game was designed without combat from the ground up. Before this we had worked on SuperEpic, which is a more tradicional metroidvania with ꦏcombat and non-linear progression, but for this new game we wanted the experience to be purely focused on three aspects: exploration, discovery and parkour. In this sense, enemies would work well as ‘active obstacles’ and players would have to know their routines and avoid them, but combat would have slowed down the pace and break the flow, so we discarded it from the beginning.”
Marie Taylor and her adventure is♔ very distinct, but it was admittedly har🧸d for me to avoid comparing her to Lara Croft while playing the game. My final question for David was in regards to the process for bringing Marie into her own and creating that original character, rather than her being a cookie-cutter version of Lara Croft.
“It’s almost impossible not to compare any female adventurer with Lara Croft, as she was one of the pioneer characters of the videogame world and is still relevant today! Obviously, as avid gamers, we took reference of our favorite leads, such as Lara, Chloe from Uncharted or Samus Aran, but the biggest inspiration to us was Faith from Mirror’s Edge. Maybe not from an aesthetic or personality point of view, but 🥃more from its energy and ability set."
And could we potentially see Marওie in other adventures and locales?
“Of course we would love to see Marie in other adventures, as all the team has grown really fond of her and there are still many treasures to discover in the world, so we hope people enjo🥃y Treasures of the Aegean and we have a future opportunity to work on them!”
A huge thank you goes out to David for taking t𝓰he time to answer some questions!
Treasures of the Aegean is available now on PC, PS💫4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nint💜endo Switch.