Tchia launched onto PS Plus Extra this week, so without over thinking it we decided to dive in for a chunky play session.
It was a rollercoaster of emotions. There’s plenty of laughs, a couple of yawns and a more than expected amount of “what the f—!” moments.
That said… Here’s what we thought.
(CAUTION: SPOILERS BELOW)
The world is really beautiful, most notably the dazzling pinks and oranges of sunset that paint the world in a gorgeous glow.
Character designs aren’t really my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say they were bad – more simple.
The standout game-play mechanic is easily the ‘soul-jumping‘. There are hundreds of creatures and objects that you can possess during your island adventure.
I loved taking to the skies as a bird and trying to aim a perfectly timed poop at unsuspecting NPCs.
Jumping into a Dolphin and whizzing through the ocean at high speed. Or possessing a deer and rag-dolling off a massive cliff and watching it bounce around on the way down, (he was fine afterwards I promise).
Perhaps my favourite thing to do though was to inhabit a rock or coconut and throw it into the air, then half a second later jump back into the same object, instantly catching up to it. Repeatedly doing this can essentially catapult you at high speeds across the map and make traversal a lot quicker when you can’t find a damn bird to possess!
It’s not a perfect system though, a lot of the items you possess don’t really do anything or have a single mechanic. Birds poop. Deer sprint. Crabs pinch. It’s all very shallow.
I took control of a push bike expecting to race it around as if someone was riding it, y’know like on the wheels. Instead it had the same physics as a rock and just tumbled head over heels wherever I would direct it.
In-fact the whole game world seems oblivious to your actions. NPCs don’t react to a coconut to the face and cars couldn’t care less if a giant teddy rolled over them whilst driving.
The worst part of Tchia was easily the map for me, they’ve gone for a very minimalist and ‘realistic’ approach where you don’t really know where your character is at any one point, just a general area. I personally loathe not knowing where I am on a map, especially in a massive open-world environment.
You can put down a single pin marker and use your compass to head in that direction, but not knowing your current location still makes navigating a chore.
There is very limited fast travel in the game, with a handful of docks that allow you to summon your boat or travel between other docks around the map. But for a world so vast it’s just not enough.
I get that they’ve made specific style choices with the map, but ultimately they make the game less fun to play around in.
It borrows a lot from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the stamina bar and glider feeling very similar to the BOTW systems.
Stamina upgrades can be found in the way of fruit and you get the glider almost as soon as your adventure begins, which is a nice touch.
Tchia also has a great physics system, with rocks tumbling down hills pretty satisfyingly or being able to use momentum to fling yourself off a tree through the air. Though unlike BOTW, which finds uses for it’s physics in puzzles and combat. In Tchia, I find it’s mostly an empty feature that doesn’t have much practical use outside of traversal.
I don’t want to touch on the story too much as I’m not that far through. But there is some pretty fucking dark shit in there! With the initial setting being family friendly, the enemies being animated pieces of cloth and the fact you can’t actually hurt any of the animals, I was pretty taken aback when the main villain ate a baby… like for real.
That was the point where I decided to stop playing, the game felt like it was clashing with itself too much and most importantly, I wasn’t having fun.
In my opinion, Tchia feels like a mash-up of too many ideas that aren’t fleshed out enough.
It should be more focused on the soul-jumping traversal that makes the game shine, expanding on those features and adding more depth.
