You know what phrase has been used just way too often lately to describe any game that has a modicum of difficulty to it? I’m sure you guessed it: “It’s like Dark Souls.” Now there are some games that do fit that category, for instance, Lords of the Fallen and the more recent The Surge created by Deck 13. Those games I consider to be Souls-like because they borrow heavily from the Souls series. But when I use Souls-like for The Warrior of Treasures, I mean it as if From Software canned the game after creating one knight, a skeleton enemy, and then gave it to a 12 year old foreign exchange student to finish up. The game is so incredibly bad that it gets to be our first Cream of the Crap article of 2018. Congrats?

The description on the Steam page does the game justice perfectly: “Indie medieval game, where player character is medieval knight. Player have to defeat skeleton army and beware different traps like fire, lava pulses, lasers, cold water etc.” That dastardly cold water! Always the bane of a medieval knight! Can’t fight the skeleton clone army if your armor is rusted! There are 6 glorious levels to choose from, each with a very cool unique name. There are levels such as Snowland 1, Snowland 2, Dungeon 1, Dungeon 2, Grassland 1, and Grassland 2. How he came up with these names is beyond me, but this is why he creates the games and I just play them.

The gameplay is where you will start seeing some of the signature Souls-like comparisons for it does play similarly. You have a standard attack, a roll dodge, block, parry, a spin attack and a thrust attack. However, The Warrior of Treasures throws a big curve ball at you and removes the ability to lock onto enemies. Yeah, which game is harder now, huh Dark Souls? You also have the ability to jump like a super hero, which is quite a feat for a knight with full plate armor on. Throughout the levels you’ll be tasked with traversing through some sinister platforming sections. Luckily there are big floating reminders that “Walling into frozen water kill player” and this gem of a reminder here:

And if the gameplay isn’t rewarding enough for you, then you will get a massive sense of accomplishment when you get to the end of a level and you see the floating “FINISH” line floating before, I presume, a treasure chest, for you are The Warrior of Treasures. You never do get to see the treasure since it just cuts to a “Congrats Level Finished” screen and then you go back to the main menu and pick the next level. Of course there is no inventory, nothing to find or collect, no weapons, no enemy variety, no leveling up or items at all, nothing to distract you from the fantastic gameplay.

The strange thing though is that the two character models (knight and skeleton) are decently detailed and the animations of the two characters are actually pretty smooth. The rolling and attacks all look good, the 3-hit combo the skeleton enemy has all flows fairly well. Too bad no other part of the game got that level of detail. There seems to be a stamina limit because you can’t just spam attacks without stopping, but of course there is no stamina bar on the H.U.D. The environments all have varying levels of details. For instance Snowland 1 looks like it was made in 10 minutes whereas Snowland 2 looks like it had some thought and better textures and such to it. However, Snowland 2 has a strange effect. If you accidentally ‘wall’ into frozen water, you will actually burst into flames like you just got decimated by a fireball. I was foolish enough to joke about rust before, but I never thought about the chemical combustion a knight’s armor could have when put in frozen water.

It took me around 27 minutes to get through all 6 expansive and carefully crafted levels. At one point once I realized there was just no reason to actually fight the skeleton clone army, I was just running straight to the end of the level. Hell, sometimes the skeletons wouldn’t even know I ran right in front of them because quite a few of them didn’t even try to follow me. The Warrior of Treasure just oozes quality and optimization, oh did I mention that the recommended specs are for an i7 and a Nvidia 900 series card? I shouldn’t be so surprised considering how gorgeous and massive this game is.

To be honest, however, if the developer Tero Lunkka can focus on providing the attention to details he put into the character models and the animations to the rest of his game, he could have something fun here. But for now the only treasure The Warrior of Treasure is getting is a beautiful Cream of the Crap award.

I did record my entire 27 minutes of gameplay with The Warrior of Treasures if you want to take a gander at this beauty: