Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures (PC)

The many adventures of H. Rider Haggard’s literary character Allan Quatermain might not really have much of a pop culture penetration these days, the series somewhat fading from view after their publication around the start of the 20th Century, but the works slipping into the public domain has allowed new life to come to the British big game hunter and African explorer. For what Sherlock Holmes is to the fictional detective, Quatermain might just be for the fictional big game hunter and explorer, and as such, he still finds life in modern stories. One such series keeping his legacy alive actually does so by way of a new character named Alicia Quatermain, the granddaughter of the famed explorer who is setting off to discover the reason behind her father’s mysterious disappearance and uncover Allan’s lost treasure by way of a time management game.

Time management is a bit of an unexciting genre name for a fairly fun style of play, but it’s perhaps the best description for how one experiences Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures. A typical level in the game involves you needing to complete a few duties to finish the level, these usually being things like finding certain treasures or opening up the way to the exit, but the means to do so are blocked by paths filled with smaller tasks you will have to complete first. Using workers to clear away roadblocks, gather resources, build resource generators, and activate buttons or other mechanisms, you gradually take an area crowded with obstructions and clean it up to be an efficient means of achieving your goal. The pressure on doing this comes in the way of your limited time, the player needing to effectively manage their workers so that they’re acting at peak efficiency. Considering how to queue up orders for your workers, which resources are most essential for tasks and should be prioritized, and choosing which path to clear first are the typical types of consideration you’ll need to make on the fly to ensure you’re remaining productive, but it’s not so fast paced that you’ll overwhelmed by the demands. Much of it is handled through simply clicking on what you need done to flag it as the next task on your workers’ agenda and there are audio cues and visual clues that will help you determine when you have enough materials to work on that project or when you can harvest a renewable resource.

 

Your main consideration will definitely be scooping up the basic resources, the play focusing heavily on your reserves of food, building materials, and gold. Certain tasks require you to spend some of your reserves to complete, so maintaining a healthy amount of any of these is crucial. One of the main considerations during play is how to spend what you have, options like making another worker, upgrading a passive resource generator, or doing the construction necessary to proceed competing for your attention. Most levels do open with a pretty straightforward design though, the player needing to work on the area around their workers’ camp to start before many real choices enter the matter. The most meaningful choices you’ll make will likely come from your extra powers, a meter building up as you work that will allow you to gain temporary boosts. These can include things like making your workers move faster so they can get more done, freezing the timer so you have more time to get your jobs done, or giving a boost to your passive resource generators. Since they all draw from the same meter, waiting to get the better powers can pay off, but so can relying on the cheaper ones since they provide more immediate benefits that can get things to a better state more quickly.

The different difficulties for the game will determine how much pressure the timer puts on your productivity, but the game does technically allow you to take your time if you so wish. Doing well in a stage is gauged by a three star system that isn’t necessary to achieve in every level. If you want a game that just gives you the satisfaction of efficiently managing tasks that’s fine, but getting three stars actually makes the work feel more involved and energetic than if you ignore the rating system. You do need to earn some eventually anyway to progress to the end of the game, the 50 levels on offer taking you all around the globe as Alicia Quatermain’s quest takes her to places like tropical islands, temple interiors, and freezing tundra. Her quest to find her father isn’t just about having the resources to explore though, as a villainess known strangely as Boss as if that was a name is pursuing your father’s lost treasure, so Alicia must get to it first while trying to survive the sabotage of Boss’s soldiers. In general, the English in the game doesn’t seem to be very well done, but things do remain pretty easy to understand even when a sentence has odd grammar or is cut off by the text box.

 

While most of your work across the many levels will still be the resource gathering and spending, some stages feature soldiers who will try to blow holes in your path to slow you down, but Alicia herself is able to defuse dynamite, the protagonist being just one of many special characters you meet on the journey who have a function you’ll need to include in your management considerations. Sadly, most of these might as well be reskins of each other. Whether it’s an old lady who can soothe baby pandas, a bigfoot who can shatter giant icicles, or an islander who can chase off crocodiles, these functions are all different visuals for the same function of needing to reach the right character to open up a new function. Even when the game does starting adding in some late game new ideas like underground tunnels, these are mostly just ways to connect paths in a different visual manner, meaning that some of the new objects aren’t really changing things up any more than the new characters.

 

The interchangeability of the characters is perhaps why Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures doesn’t reach the heights it could have. It does succeed at building up many time management levels that are interesting to complete, but it doesn’t have too many different mechanics in play to keep things consistently fresh. It’s not a case of the game dragging out the systems on offer so much as settling in early to a design and then just shifting around how it’s presented. There are hidden puzzle pieces in most stages that unlock a secret level though, and this secret level perhaps best shows how the game could have achieved more variety. The secret levels have more unique goals for their resource management, things like needing to build up enough of one type of resource differing from the typical level structure of gradually clearing the path so you can grab the important item, hit the important button, or leave through the exit. A few regular stages do tap on this design as well, but the core design is relied on for the most part, ensuring a consistently enjoyable game but one that isn’t adding in new elements to keep it fresh or recontextualizing the effective but simple basics.

THE VERDICT: Alicia Quatermain: Secret of the Lost Treasures is a well-crafted time management game, the need to balance your work to gather resources and spend them properly across its 50 levels making for a satisfying sense of efficiency and productivity. It’s got its quirks like awkward English, but the core play works well and the flow of most levels are spaced well to keep you involved in managing your workers and reserves during the whole stage. Most of its level design is about rearranging or reskinning mechanics and interactive objects, and while more diverse level goals would be appreciated, the extra powers and more difficult layouts ensure there is still some strategy required that ensures it is not just a game of clicking exactly what the game tells you to click.

 

And so, I give Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures for PC…

A GOOD rating. When you are dropped in a level in Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures, there are winding paths filled with various resources, roadblocks, and structures, but as you work towards clearing the level, seeing it open up through your work and planning is a pretty satisfying experience. It can be relaxing to just set up a queue of actions for your workers and watch them scurry to complete it, and while it would be nice to have more meaningful considerations to make across the levels, things never reach the point where you are overly rushed to make important decisions. Stages feel more like light puzzles rather than complex strategies that could have strained the formula, but angling for three stars in a level will require some smarts, with later levels especially asking you to think about a click instead of just doing whatever action is available to you.

 

If you are looking for a way to enter the time management genre to see if the style is to your liking, Alicia Quatermain: Secrets of the Lost Treasures is a pretty good place to start despite its language hiccups. The design is simple to understand with the low general difficulty making it a good fit for some casual enjoyment. More creativity in object and goal design would benefit the title of course, but it still mixes up its essential elements enough that its levels remaining interesting management challenges.