Developed by: Awaceb
Available on: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
A few months ago, Tchia’s trailers caught my attention. It seemed interesting enough, so when it was released earlier this month, I gave it a shot (it didn’t hurt that it was included in PlayStation Plus, meaning I didn’t have to pay anything).
In Tchia, you play as a little girl named Tchia and you explore an archipelago meant to resemble New Caledonia (a group of islands near Australia) while on a quest to save your father from unknown kidnappers. There’s a variety of ways to get around. You can sail, you can glide, you can climb Breath of the Wild-style, and you can do soul jumps, which is basically the capture ability from Super Mario Odyssey. For fun, you can also do flips, play the ukulele, try activities like rock balancing, customize your look, take pictures, and goof around with various emotes that Tchia has.
With a description like that, Tchia sounds like it should be the best game ever. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a mostly boring experience.
The game starts you out in a little tutorial area. It’s there that you get the basics on most of the game’s controls and mechanics. After a sluggish series of tutorials and cutscenes, the exciting moment came when I was finally unleashed into the world. The game dropped me off in the middle of a city and I found, well, not much. Walking around for a bit revealed nothing that I could interact with, and I was left with nothing to do except go to the quest waypoint marked on my compass.
The rest of the game followed this trend: being presented with something that appears exciting, but turns out to be nothing. For example, you’d think unlocking the soul-jumping ability would lead to an explosion of mechanics to play with, but all you can do with it is launch inanimate objects and possess animals that can’t do much more than move.
The unfortunate part is the controls feel great, better even than a fair number of AAA games. They’re intuitive, well-mapped, and buttery smooth. I never felt frustrated moving around as Tchia.
What keeps Tchia from being good is the fact that its world just doesn’t have enough interesting things to do. The open world in Tchia is that of a Ubisoft game. You travel waypoint-to-waypoint to pick up collectibles and do simple activities. The game tries to make traveling and exploring feel more authentic by limiting fast travel options and not telling you your exact position on the map. However, because you can still mark a waypoint on the map and have your compass tell you exactly which direction to go, these measures prove to be nothing more than an annoyance.
Story missions are hardly anything more than fetch quests, intermitted only by a simple and boring rhythm game where you play your ukulele in some song and dance. The game also often forces you to travel back and forth large distances for no particular reason.
The experience becomes a little more bearable as you discover faster ways to move. You can soul jump into birds and fly, you can catapult yourself from the tops of trees, you can slide down hills at mach one, and you can launch yourself like a cannonball by possessing an item, launching it, and immediately repossessing it.
Sadly, this doesn’t help with the game’s combat. In combat, you find sources of fire or explosives, possess them, and then launch them at enemies. It never evolves beyond this. There are never new mechanics or new types of enemies that keep it fresh, and it never presents any sort of challenge. It’s fun enough the first couple of times you do it, but clearing enemy encampments quickly just becomes a chore. The biggest ones even have over 50 enemies each (and when there is only a few left, good luck finding them).
Thankfully, these combat sequences are never technically mandatory to beat the game. Sometimes you’ll have to go into the middle of their encampments, but you can just ignore them and fulfill your objective. Their aim is terrible and simply walking at a constant pace is enough to dodge them. Unfortunately, because they’re always looming, exploring the world becomes even less palatable.
The effort that might’ve been put into adding interesting ideas and mechanics appears to have instead been invested in the ukulele. You can pull it out and freestyle with it at any time, and there’s honestly an impressive amount of capabilities with it. You can strum, you can pluck, you can switch between scales and play any note, and you can even adjust the pitch of a note and add a little vibrato to it. It’s an incredibly elaborate system that you will mess around with for 30 seconds before getting bored and going back to the game. (By the way, these mechanics only exist during freestyle; the mandatory ukulele-playing sequences restrict most of your control.)
The story itself is as simple and barebones as stories can be. Turns out the aforementioned kidnappers work for an evil god that eats babies, and Tchia, who’s apparently the chosen one, must stop it. Character development is nonexistent. We never learn anything about Tchia other than that she’s a generally good person. Other characters don’t give us anything either, largely because most of them will help you in one or two missions and then are never seen again.
Cutscenes are frequent and slow. Occasionally, there’s a joke or a funny moment that makes me laugh, but the rest of the time they’re just boring. Eventually, I began skipping them all.
Not long after that, I began skipping the gameplay as well (there’s an option in the pause menu that lets you skip gameplay segments). I intended to skip to the part(s) of the game where I unlock new mechanics and abilities that make it more fun, but sadly I instead just found the game’s credits.