Tchia Review (Xbox Series X)

STAFF REVIEW of Tchia (Xbox Series X)

Wednesday, August 14, 2024.
by Peggy Doyle

Officially released for PlayStation and PC in March, Tchia has finally made its way to Xbox. I had been following this game's development and launch closely as it checked a lot of boxes for me. It is an adorable game about a young person setting out on a worldly journey full of discovery. Developed by Awaceb and published by Kepler Interactive, Tchia is an action-adventure game where you play as the titular character as she searches for her kidnapped father. She explores a fictional archipelago inspired by New Caledonia. New Caledonia is a French territory consisting of dozens of small islands in the South Pacific. This means you have a beautiful environment filled with oceans, reefs, and palm-lined beaches. It also happens to be the homeland of the studio's co-founders.

Tchia is built like many other games of the same genre. You explore and discover by climbing, sliding, jumping, swimming and even gliding. There are many things to collect on the map, like braided grass trinkets in various shapes, pearls at the bottom of the ocean, and stamina fruit. These stamina fruit permanently increase your stamina bar when consumed. It’s worth hunting them down to make your travelling easier. Icons for collectibles will appear when you get close to them, or you can get them to all appear by unlocking the viewpoints around the map. Climb to these high points and ‘shout’ to unlock the area. You will find treasure maps throughout the story that are worth seeking out and add another layer of gameplay.

The standout mechanic in Tchia is ‘soul jumping’. You can highlight almost any object and jump into it, controlling its movement. This can allow you to embody over 30 animals like a shark, deer, or chicken (lay an egg for an achievement), or even something inanimate like a lantern or a rock. You can roll around as the lantern and light things on fire. This specific ability comes into play when you are in combat and clearing encampments. While combat exists in some limited areas, there is no real fail state. If you die, you will respawn at the closest save point where you can try again or move on to another activity.

Along with the minimal combat and abundant exploration, there are some cutscenes between ‘Chapters’ where you will get a little more story added and learn a new song on your trusty ukelele. Learning a song allows to learn some news skills, like changing the time of day, or even summoning animals. This takes the form of mini rhythm games that were more difficult for me than I anticipated. There is an achievement associated with getting 100% on any of them should you do better than I did. There is also an autoplay feature that lets you sit back and watch the lyrics to the song on your screen. I found myself doing that more often than not as when you are playing the mini game, you miss the lyrics, and thus the story.

Other minigames are spread out over the map, including a rock balancing game where you must stack piles of rocks to reach a minimum height. These were much easier to complete than I thought they would be. You will also participate in races and slingshot shooting competitions. These minigames will earn you trophies that can be deposited into claw machines within some villages, which in turn can earn you cosmetics.

Almost every bit of dialogue is subtitled into English, with the voice actors doing a wonderful job of conveying feeling and emotion, even if I only picked up parts of what they were saying with my limited French knowledge. Similar to the people who reside in New Caledonia, the dialogue is in French and Drehu. They weren’t able to find any professional voice actors who spoke Drehu though. This means that the dialogue spoken in Drehu is not professional actors. That makes the game even more interesting to me.

Narratively, the story of Tchia is formatted like a real folktale passed down through generations. The story is well constructed. The story and missions in Tchia were surprisingly more intense than I imagined. The cute graphic style lulled me into thinking this would be light-hearted. You are dealing with topics that really matter. There are kidnappings and corporations doing sketchy business practices on the islands for example.

Tchia does have some accessibility options to make things easier and more approachable to gamers. You can turn the stamina bar off or make certain cutscenes more family friendly for children.

There is a certain warmth that is really hard to describe with Tchia. It seems rather simplistic to think that this is a story about people, and their culture, how they live day to day, the music they play, the stories they tell and the food they eat, how they treat one another and strangers. This filled me with a heart-warming feeling watching these island communities living their daily lives in the beautiful island world.

I loved Tchia enough that I will go back and search out every collectible I’ve missed. I was all the cute costumes and decorations for my raft. The game takes about 10 hours to play through, and although it was quite repetitive at times, I enjoyed it. It’s a straightforward game full of simple pleasures.

**Tchia was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 8.5 / 10
Gameplay: 8.0 / 10
Visuals: 8.5 / 10
Sound: 9.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Tchia (Xbox Series X)

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