Not to brag, but on our street, today is Garbage Day, and I celebrated by standing in front of my bedroom window for ten minutes or so while a stray yogurt carton ran up and down the path outside our house. It sounds a bit American Beauty, I know, but it’s actually a breezy delight. The wind appropriately animates this yogurt carton, finding a genuine comic role for it as it swings up and down the pavement. Honestly, leaving it for a school run is a bit of a hassle.
How Tchia, I thought in hindsight. Tchia is a game that stays in your memory long after you’ve played it. Things that aren’t great fade away, and things that other games can’t do just get brighter. Tchia is a game about exploring the islands of the Southwest Pacific: you play as a child, and the world around you is absolutely massive as it rushes in every direction. But you have this power that allows you to hold on to it. You can “soul hop” into nearby animals and certain objects, run across the globe like a deer, swoop under clouds like a dove, and tumble like a lantern or a rock. Animated by motion! Yogurt boxes are at home.
Soul Leap is definitely the best place for Tchia. It’s fun to find out what you can do as a shark that you can’t as a crab, and it’s nice to be able to beat the terrain that was so painful while climbing a hill by jumping on a nearby bird and riding a horse before you soar high over a moment. Soul jumping is relevant to combat here–you can jump into a lantern to set the game’s rag-based enemies on fire and destroy their camps, and you can throw rocks around–but when you soul jump into and out of objects , held only returns via an expandable pool of soul-jumping mana, which you can also chain with other traversal elements of the game.
They are also very smart. A lot of this is pinched straight from Breath of the Wild: as long as your stamina meter lasts, you’ll be able to climb any surface or slide from heights, and, like Zelda, you’ll even be able to drag while gliding occasionally. Plunge out of your stamina wisely. But there are lovely wrinkles here and there. Tchia’s raft requires you to move between setting the sails and using the steering stick (I’m not much of a sailor), and the trees – oh my god, the trees here. Climb to the top and you can swing them back and forth, then blast yourself forward into space for a real boost of speed and distance. This is how children think trees work. Hope you can see what happens next – swoop and soul jump, swoop and glide, swoop and climb the mountain face and climb! Climb, climb, climb. It’s a treat.
Tchia’s archipelago was quietly designed around these skills of yours. Because you can dive, the sea floor is filled with pale corals and fat clam shells and pearls waiting to be picked. Since you can jump from tree to tree, there’s forest of various densities, including some lovely swamps. Because you can climb, the islands have a broad raised ridge running through their center, like the back of a sleeping dinosaur. There are villages with huts, industrial areas and modest-sized cities. If you have some sense of scale, a confusing (sorry) comparison to Just Cause 2 might be useful. It’s not as big as Just Cause 2 in any way, but given the size of its child protagonist, Tchia has the same sense of gigantic size as Just Cause 2. Several large islands and lovely waters around them. There’s a lot more territory here than you might imagine.
so what are you doing here? I’m going to split these things in two, even though you’re never supposed to do that in a game, and definitely let things flow together in a wonderful tapestry of silly whims and brief distractions. First things first: Tchia’s story is a lot more than I thought it would be, and it’s a completely different story than I imagined. I saw the art and played a gentle demo, and thought I was doing something a little like a short hike: an interesting exploration of the landscape and its joys, along a gentle narrative. Instead, it’s pretty intense stuff. Kidnapped! God of mythology! People take knives in the face (srsly)! Children are eaten!
This amounts to a series of quests throughout the game, and at times it feels a bit like being in Far Cry. For a while, I was exploring some industrial areas with the camera, and then I went in and smashed everything, and A Short Hike felt really far away. far cry? The methods that define a Ubisoft series have the same scope, the same willingness to make you try something reckless and suffer the consequences. No guns or getaway cars, sure, but you can soul jump, which means rocks, exploding rocks, lanterns, and flame spreads, and jump a pigeon to give yourself some distance.
Not all tasks are the same, and variety is actually one of Tchia’s many strengths. But they’re – at least for me – very strong. You’re dealing with what’s really important and moving through a storyline that’s unafraid to go from one horror to the next. My daughter is nine, and I’m not sure I’m going to let her see a couple of specific cutscenes here.
Meanwhile, islands! Islands! Rocks to embody, trees to dive in, mountains to climb. Tchia’s island is definitely where Ubisoft gets busy, from all sorts of gizmos to collect, fruits that boost your stamina, challenge rooms to unlock with engraving mini-games, boost your soul-jumping mana, and all sorts of other stuff. Climb up the game’s equivalent of Assassin’s Eagle Tower, and the map will be filled with all sorts of things. place to eat. Ports unlocked for fast travel. Pearls are plucked from their cases. Enemy camps explode.
A lot of this is really just something to do, remember, it’s all about sweeping along with the narrative stuff, stitching into delightful shapes as you jump, slide, and drift around the game world. Some of them are suitably inspired, though. I like playing music. I loved the treasure maps I received, they encouraged me to look for clues in the world itself. I like the fact that, for the most part, the game’s map only gives me a rough idea of where I’m actually located, kind of jazzy. I like to rock up in a new place and have dinner before going to sleep by the campfire.
I think the dinner thing is very important. It gets the special charm of Tchia. I’ve never been to New Caledonia, but Tchia is definitely steeped in a culture that I feel is deeply inspired by. Songs, language, art, the way people live and what they value. And what they eat. Someone wise once told me that The Odyssey is really a story about how people are popular. Odysseus goes from island to island to see how they treat strangers. Kind of reductive, I feel, but there’s a little bit of that in Tchia: you travel through the world, and then you have lunch when you’ve settled down. In some cases, you can even craft food and find ingredients. But the game stays focused on the plate, the types of food, the human warmth of food, and what it all means.
That’s what I’m going to take with me, I thought, and the great moment I climbed over a huge ridge, the moment at sea with watercolor clouds piled up overhead in a giant tumbling anvil, and the moment I gliding did it all together A dangerous story quest, seeing something shiny in the swamp I absolutely had to explore. Writing like this, I see that Tchia is not just a game about children, it is a game about children eager to find meaning and interest in a wide range of things. Of course, end a busy day with a good dinner. outstanding.
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