Production Values
Unsurprisingly, Treasure Tracker, even as a 2018 release on a Nintendo platform, looks great, and not just for a Switch game. It benefits immensely from the platform's regular first-party aesthetic boost and the stylized graphics. Rarely did the environments show pixelated edges, though one screenshot was uncharacteristically blurry. Central characters Captain Toad, Toadette, and Wingo, the enormous bird that bothers both protagonists by flying away with them or their stars, have excellent models with smooth animations. Diverse in color and function, the many environments to be traversed are often unique from each other, with their own clear animations and very distinctive perils or features: fiery dragon-like entities, goombas, hammer-throwing koopas, falling platforms, and much more.
Gameplay
Treasure Tracker is divided into a series of episodes, collections of levels often tied to a specific playable character in the case of the first three and a collection of levels related to Super Mario Odyssey in the case of the fourth. Episode 1 is spent playing as Captain Toad as he tries to rescue Toadette, Episode 2 is spent playing as Toadette as she tries to rescue Captain Toad, and Episode 3 alternates between both playable characters. Both when it comes to flipping between pages of the onscreen book that displays each mission and when it comes to certain mechanics, the game utilizes the Switch's touch screen, a very rare thing despite how much the 3DS and its own predecessors heavily relied on this feature. Titles for the Switch tend to have very little to no touch screen functionality, so for Treasure Tracker to do anything with this actually makes it stand out. For instance, tapping an enemy can freeze them in place or send a piranha plant back to the opening they emerged from.
Levels tend to be very small, dense with crevices that items like gems or coins could hide in. Most have a small cube-shaped mass where the player's character cannot fall off the map by walking to its edges, though some do allow the player to fall in certain places. As condensed, short, and straightforward as many levels are, the environmental design and puzzle elements vary significantly and trend towards genuine creativity, especially further into the game. Yes, some can be finished in less than two to three minutes; the sheer volume of levels and the differences between them somewhat make up for this extreme brevity. Rotating the camera is often a necessity to fully see where to go or find optional items. A total of three distinct levels of camera magnification also help with visibility. Sometimes, Toad or Toadette will be very small on the screen if not for the two closer zoom-in settings.
You do not strictly have to complete every single level to beat the game, since some levels can only be unlocked with enough total gems, and you do not need all gems obtainable up to that point to proceed; any levels that come afterward are locked until the completion of these particular areas. Replaying any mission is an easy affair. Actually, there is a potential incentive to replay besides finding missed gems, and that is locating "Pixel Toad," a Toad somewhere on a flat surface in each level that is animated as if from an earlier era of gaming. Here, Treasure Tracker leans more into observation than it does outright puzzle mechanics, though some reorientation of or navigation through an area might be necessary. The Pixel Toad is visible oftentimes without even walking around the map: camera adjustments can reveal its exact position.
Should you wander around hoping to stumble into Pixel Toad more directly, it generates a sound when the player stands in close proximity—but sometimes the pixelated figure is outside the walkable area. This noise does not automatically clarify where in the immediate vicinity it is, though. Camera manipulation might still be needed! When you see Pixel Toad, you press on his location through the touch screen to complete the level. As simple as it is, this and other touch screen functionality like spinning wheel-directed mechanisms really are uncommon on the platform.
Story
While celebrating over a star (the kind obtained in Mario-related games), Toadette is abducted by Wingo, compelling Captain Toad to venture his way to the bird for a rescue. After passing through a multitude of environments, however, he winds up taken himself in an event which leaves Toadette free to pursue the avian kidnapper to liberate Captain Toad.
Intellectual Content
Such a game as this is nowhere close to gaming's heights of exploring the nature of reality. Even at the level of navigating worlds, there is nothing as perilous as some feats in Super Mario Sunshine or as relatively abstract as the environments and mechanics of Super Mario Galaxy, the game that set in motion the eventual release of Treasure Tracker. This title is for the most part about simplicity, relaxation, and quite narrow exploration.
Conclusion
Treasure Tracker does an excellent job of delivering increasingly complex and diverse environmental puzzles with strong visuals, but it is very limited in basically every other aspect. This can tend to be the case with games in the massive Mario franchise and its branching titles, even as many of them have more layered mechanics than this title. The simplicity is usually not this extreme. There remain distinctive pillars of quality in Treasure Tracker, as much as it is but a narrow representation of what its broader universe has produced. Even so, Captain Toad from Super Mario Galaxy came a long way before even 10 years had passed!
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