What this amounts to is a series of missions running through the game that can sometimes feel a bit like you've been dropped into Far Cry. Kidnappings! Mythical gods! People getting knives in the face (srsly)! Children getting eaten!
I saw the art and played a gentle demo and thought I was in for something a bit like A Short Hike: a playful exploration of landscape and its pleasures, threaded along a gentle narrative. The first thing: Tchia has much more of a story than I was expecting, and it's not remotely the kind of story I was imagining. So what do you do here? I'm going to divide these things in two, even though in the game you should never do that, and absolutely let things flow together in a wonderful tapestry of foolish whims and passing distractions. There's much more territory here than you might expect. A couple of great islands and a lovely stretch of water around them. It's not as big as Just Cause 2 in any way, but given the size of its child protagonist, Tchia has that same Just Cause 2 sense of being really quite surprisingly vast. If you're after a sense of the scale, a confusing - sorry - comparison with Just Cause 2 might be useful. There are villages with huts to hop from, industrial areas, and a decent-sized city. Because you can climb, the islands have a generous spine of humped mountain running through their heartlands, like the ridged backs of sleeping dinosaurs. Because you can fling yourself from one tree to the next, there are forests of all different kinds of density, including some lovely marshy spots. Because you can dive, the seabed is alive with pastel coral and clamshells fat with pearls waiting to be pinched. Tchia's archipelago is quietly designed around these skills of yours. And hopefully you can see what happens next - fling and then soul jump, fling and then glide, fling and then limpet yourself to a mountain surface and climb! Climb climb climb.
Climb to the top and you can swing them back and forth and then fling yourself forward into space to get a real boost in speed and distance. Tchia's raft requires you to move between setting the sail and using the steering pole thing (I am not much of a mariner), while trees - oh god, the trees here. But there are lovely wrinkles added everywhere. A lot of them are straight up pinched from Breath of the Wild: you can climb any surface or glide from a height as long as your stamina gauge lasts, and, as with Zelda, you can even drag out your stamina when gliding with the occasional judicious plummet. Soul jumping ties into what passes for 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 fling rocks about - but as you soul jump in and out of objects, held back only by an extendable pool of soul jump mana, you can chain it together with the game's other traversal elements too.Īnd they're brilliant as well. It's fun to find out what you can do as a shark that you can't do as a crab, and it's nice to get a weird kind of revenge on a mountain climb that has been defeating you by just hopping into a nearby bird and riding high over the terrain that had been such a pain moments before. Soul jumping is absolutely the best thing about Tchia. Animated by movement! The yogurt carton would be right at home. You can "soul jump" into nearby animals and certain objects, racing over the earth as a deer, swooping under the clouds as a pigeon, tumbling along as a lantern or a rock. But you have this power that allows you to get a grip on it. Tchia's a game about exploring an archipelago in the southwest Pacific: you're cast as a child and the world around you is absolutely huge as it rushes off in every direction. The things that don't quite work fade and the things that no other game does quite the same way only grow brighter. Tchia is one of those games that lives on in the memory after you're done with it. Availability: Out today on PC, PS4, and PS5.To be honest, it was a bit of a wrench to leave it and do the school run. The wind properly animated this yogurt carton, finding a real comic character for it as it batted back and forth along the paving. It sounds a bit American Beauty, I know, but actually it was a brisk delight. Not bragging, but on our street, today is bin day, and I celebrated by standing for ten minutes or so at the bedroom window while a stray yogurt carton ran up and down the path outside our house. A glorious spell of island hopping, with some surprisingly nasty moments.
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