General: Untold Riches is a straightforward, by-the-numbers treasure hunt that knows what it is and knows what it isn’t. You turn up stranded on a deserted island, missing the adventuring professor whose sidekick you are and whose hijinks have gotten you into this pickle in the first place, with nothing but your wits and a few glaringly placed crucial items that point towards hidden treasure on your new island abode. Puzzle-solving awaits. I’m definitely not the target audience for it–I didn’t know it was written for middle-schoolers when I started playing, but I’m certainly not surprised–but I enjoyed it well enough all the same.
Story: The story, such as it exists, has a pretty tropey quasi-Magician’s Nephew feel to it: playing a sidekick to an absent mentor in a completely deserted environment, trying to piece together his work. I mean, it’s also literally a treasure hunt on a deserted island, so I’m sort of picking at something entirely comprised of tropes here looking for tropes. And it shows every sign of being self-aware–every flashback having to do with your absent professor is a tongue-in-cheek, bog-standard Indiana Jones reference. I keep making references to the perfunctory nature of the story, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing: in fact, I think more of a plot would have cluttered and confused the game. This is a game that’s very well aware that it is a game, after all, not primarily a narrative, and it quickly establishes a predicament and a driving goal for the player. Being led off to discover more about the professor and the backstory would have complicated this throughline.
Design: Everything about Untold Riches’ design is pinned to default IF scaffolding–the mechanics, the standard verbs used, the nature of the puzzle construction. It’s intuitive and, again, straightforward. There was a general lack of red herrings and I don’t think it was possible to trigger a no-win condition, which makes as much sense as the rest; the result was a sort of “collect items, wander around looking for where to use each one, repeat” puzzle structure which was very beginner-friendly. I was surprised at the lack of an in-depth help menu on the basics of playing IF; it’s the main gap in the accessibility of the otherwise extremely accessible game, and given that accessibility is its main goal as far as I can tell, I wonder if the inclusion of one wouldn’t be in order.
As another teacher of middle-schoolers, I find the teaching element of the game kind of interesting: what’s it intended to teach? How well did the students respond to it? Did they find it fun? Did they successfully solve the puzzles by themselves, or navigate the hint system? I don’t know and can’t infer the answers to these questions, except to speculate that the game might have been intended to teach problem-solving and also basic IF design–if there’s an IF design component to the lesson, I’d certainly be interested to see what sorts of projects Untold Riches inspired.
Orestes Drunk and Pylades Fasting 