Tchia is set in a fictional tropical archipelago inspired not only by the physical features of the real island nation of New Caledonia but also its culture and heritage. It’s an open world adventure game with a strong narrative based around family and friendship with magical, mystical elements.
You play as the game’s heroine – Tchia, a 12 year old girl who is living a seemingly idyllic life on a tropical island. All is well until her father is abducted by Meavora, a tyrannical god that rules over the archipelago’s people. Tchia embarks on a grand adventure to find her father and ends up unlocking hidden special powers and uncovering the truth about who she really is.
The animation of the people may be simple, but this tropical paradise looks stunning. The crystal-clear aquamarine ocean, white sands and lush forests look like they have been rendered by the New Caldedonia tourist board, as inviting as they are. We appreciated the fact that the characters converse in their native language, as well as French, and didn’t find having to read subtitles a chore at all. In fact, at no point did we feel the need to skip through conversations, as we have found in other similar games, as the content is well-written and often a meaningful look between characters is used instead of speech to great effect.
As with similar games, Tchia is given certain tasks to carry out by the people she meets along the way in order to progress the story. At the start of the game these tasks are used as a tutorial system to teach the player the many features of the game – and there are many, so expect a lot to learn in a short space of time. We did find this a little overwhelming and thought that perhaps this could have been spaced out more. Tchia possesses many skills; some mundane like running, jumping, climbing and swimming; others more skilled like sailing, gliding, playing the ukulele, using a slingshot and photography and a few magical abilities like soul-jumping (more about that later).
This game promotes itself as open-world and it certainly is that – from the start we fully felt fully immersed in the lush surroundings and revelled in the ability to explore the three islands to our heart’s content. We were very happy to find out that Tchia can swim and dive, which opened up a whole other world as you get to explore underwater as well. Because of the size of the map, it does take a frustratingly long time to get to places by walking so pretty early in the game Tchia becomes the skipper of a boat that allows her to move much more quickly along the coast of each island and between them.
Landing at different docks unlocks the ability to fast-track between them, cutting the need for sailing at all. However, Tchia will have to traverse land occasionally so walking and climbing is needed, however slow.
Tchia possesses a stamina bar that is depleted by climbing, gliding (where she holds on to a small parachute) and being attacked by Meavora’s cronies. The bar can be refilled by eating at food shacks dotted around the map but as it will gradually refill by itself we didn’t see any need for these. If you run out of stamina, or fall too far, it’s game over and Tchia will respawn at the nearest campsite – places where she can rest, eat and progress time.
In terms of time passing, you will experience many a beautiful sunrise and sunset in the game. It is possible to play throughout the night, although some tasks are a little tricky in low light and the meagre beam from your torch is really only suitable for exploring caves. You can, however, choose to move forward in time by using your ukulele. Tchia can unlock different short melodies that magically affect the world, such as changing the time of day or manifesting different animals that can be used to soul jump (explained soon – promise). There are also short musical segments scattered throughout the game where you get to strum along to some quite catchy songs using rhythm-based gameplay. These segments will come after a cutscene, of which there are many.
We said at the start that this game has a strong narrative and the cutscenes are used to great effect to progress the story line and generally tug at the heart strings as Tchia interacts with characters she meets along the way..
Okay – let’s talk soul-jumping, Tchia’s magical ability to take control of animals and small objects. If the object is explosive, like an oil lamp, once possessed Tchia can perform a soul-throw, which launches the object at enemies. But it’s soul-jumping into animals that offers the most fun, as it allows you to swim effortlessly through the ocean as a dolphin or fly across mountains as a bird. However, the time you are able to soul-jump is limited meaning that you can’t travel very far at a time, unless you slide into the accessibility menu and make some sneaky changes. Is being able to fly or swim to another island cheating? We don’t think so and who wouldn’t want to swim as a dolphin rather than sail on a much slower boat?
Even though on the whole Tchia is not a challenging game, there are quite a few options to make it even easier. Fed up of dying and respawning somewhere else? No problem. Want to skip a whole section of gameplay? This is possible. It made us think that these options made Tchia an ideal game for the younger player, until we found out that Maevora eats children in one memorable cutscene where they slurp down a baby like an oyster.
If you were thinking that Tchia is a relaxing play from start to finish, think again as it does contain some stealth and combat. You will come across Maevora’s cronies, strange enchanted entities made of ribbons, throughout the game. At the start of the main storyline entering their camps and destroying them using your soul-jumping is optional. However, as the game progresses you can’t avoid battling them as the storyline requires you to take them down. We didn’t particularly enjoy this as using the soul-jumping as your only means of combat got incredibly frustrating at times as we ran around trying to find an explosive object we could control while simultaneously trying to avoid being spotted by the enemy. This is one part of the game where a trip to that accessibility menu might be a good idea…
Tchia may have certain objectives to progress the main storyline, and completing this will take a few hours, but players can take their time as there are an incredible number of things to explore and do – if you can locate the points of interest. For some reason unclear to us the designers decided not to track Tchia’s location on the map, unless she is on her boat. She will make a guess at her general location when asked, but her exact location is only revealed on finding sign-posts scattered across the islands. The only saving grace here is that the location of your next tasks are marked, and you can use a compass to head in the correct direction. If your sense of direction is better than ours (and no doubt it is) then you can find and carry out several mini-games like races, building pebble towers to unlock more magical ukulele melodies, carving totem heads to increase soul-jumping time, finding treasure chests that contain different clothes for Tchia, and (our personal favourite) a treasure hunt.
Tchia is a game with longevity as finding every collectible, completing every mini-game and killing every bad guy can still be accomplished on completion of the main storyline. Complete with a beautiful location inspired by Caledonian culture, there should be no reason to not follow Tchia’s journey.
Will we be going back to the islands? Almost certainly.
