A sequel to Treasure Mountain! that focuses on basic mathematical concepts. The game takes place in a magical realm called Treasure Mountain. As the game opens, the Master of Mischief, the common antagonist to the Super Seekers games, uses a weather machine to freeze the mountain in snow and ice and scatters the castle's treasures all over the mountain. The player takes on the role of the Super Seeker, whose job is to find the scattered treasures and return them to the castle's treasure chest in order to thaw out the mountain. The mountain itself consists of three levels. The player cannot climb higher until he has gathered the supplies, like ice axes, ladders, or catapult parts, useful for scaling the mountain. To obtain these items, the players must help out the local inhabitants complete math-related tasks such as adjusting clocks to a given time, balancing scales, and counting crystals. In order to find treasures, the player must place a specific amount of snowballs at a certain location. To find out how many snowballs are needed, the player must catch an elf carrying a scroll. If he answers the riddle correctly, he will be told how to find treasures on that particular level. Once the player reaches the top of the castle on the highest level of the mountain, he deposits all treasures found into the castle's treasure chest and is given a prize as a reward for completing the three stages. This prize is kept on display in the player's clubhouse, showing how many times he has ascended the mountain. These prizes are usually children's toys, such as flutes or toy trains. From this point, the player may exit the clubhouse and start again from the bottom of the mountain. At higher ranks, the game becomes more difficult, as there will be more treasures to find, harder riddles to answer, and snowbullies that steal money.
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I was honestly pleasantly surprised. Of course this is a very old game for children so I have to judge it based on that criteria, but I found it compelling nonetheless. The story is kind of nonsense but the art is charming and the music has solid hooks - it's not repetitive (for how long you spend hearing each song) or irritating like the music in a lot of these games can be. Each level of the mountain has its own sound and distinct appearance. Even the main NPCs on each level have subtle personality quirks suggested in their animations that are fitting for them; the Time elf on the first level will tap his watch if you take too long to determine the answer and tap his foot in time to your button inputs, for example. The prizes you get for completing each climb are also animated if you press their corresponding number while in the prize cave. These little details weren't necessary for an educational game to do its job but they do a lot of heavy lifting to make Treasure Mountain a place I wanted to be. I don't recall noticing all of these details when I was a kid but I definitely appreciated them now.
I streamed about 2 hours of this for some friends who are also nostalgic about 90s edutainment games and I figured I'd stop afterwards. But as I was ranking up and getting the prizes, I realized that I had never actually made much progress in this game when I was a kid. I was curious about what would happen at the end. So over the course of 2 weeks I chipped away at it. If there's anything bad to say about this game, it's that playing it with the goal of winning sure is a grind. Comparatively, mind you. I've spent longer in other games' repetitive tedium by far but the nature of the doing the same loop over and over with the moderate effort required to do middle school level math (if you were never a math wiz like me) certainly gets to a person. But this game was not made for me, an adult. Children tend to do much better with a structure like this because they have much more time on their hands and fewer expectations of how to best spend it.
I won't make judgement calls here on how good of a use of my time an entire play-through of Treasure MathStorm was for me or anyone my age. It's not the point. But I will say that I actually enjoyed myself. I didn't expect anything big from the ending and it was just satisfying enough. I got to see the end with my own effort and that's all I really wanted from the experience. It was cool to revisit a strong piece of nostalgia from my childhood.