Developer Awaceb gave us a sneak peek at one of the more fascinating and gorgeous open-world adventure games called Tchia. This game has our titular character going out and trying to explore two separate, very large islands in search of her missing father. A plot that only a Fallout fan could love. The game is everything an open-world exploration should be, even going as far as introducing some familiar mechanics that you’ve seen in certain Nintendo titles before. From what we played, we can see it’s going down the right road in not only capturing your attention with the story, but also mesmerizing you with unbelievably gorgeous graphics, and gameplay that is fun.
On that note, let’s get into some early impressions of Tchia.
Familiar Gameplay
You start off in an oceanic world that contains two islands, and you travel by land, sea, or air to get around. The islands are huge and contain very distinguishable sections, housing their own flavor of enemies and motivation to keep exploring. You won’t find much to be bored about during your adventure, as the game throws in goodies here and there that make you want to explore every inch of what Awaceb created. A lot of what Tchia relies on to keep the gameplay flowing comes straight from The Legend of Zelda series. And it’s more of a homage than anything else. Anyway, let’s discuss some transportation modes and some Zelda familiarity.
Traveling by land
Using your own two feet to get across the islands, even going as far as swimming – though exhaustion is a possibility, this is the first mode of transportation when you’re exploring. You’ll run into the most unique scenarios and landscapes with this form of mobility. You’ll truly get to see what the land has to offer in terms of wildlife and environmental personalities.
To keep you motivated to continue exploring, the game has hidden treasures scattered around the island. Sometimes they’re in caves, sometimes they’re in open areas. Regardless, it will ask you to find and complete tasks to get those treasures open. Finding them randomly means there is a quest somewhere to unlock them. Thus, creating motivation to explore and complete tasks. All this plays hand in hand with each other and hooks and engages you. Small pieces like this create more interest in exploring, which is what you want out of a game of this nature. You literally will just accidentally run across these items and wonder what you need to do to get them completed.
Beyond treasure, you will find the occasional enemy called the Maano. They’re sheet-wearing scumbags that will wrap you up in their linen and try to kill you. What are fabric-laden enemies afraid of? Fire of course! Using fire will do the trick when it comes to conquering them. While it can get tricky trying to take a group of them down without exhausting yourself, the reward for doing so is worth the chore. I won’t get into the latter, but they’re tricky and dreadful enemies. You’ll find them scattered around the island in bunches.
Now, outside of fire and burning sheet enemies, the main weapon you must use to help ward off baddies or take aim at other things is a trusty slingshot. This is a familiar tool if you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (or Ocarina of Time). It’s nothing too complicated, especially if you play with a controller (highly recommended). I think the innocence of the game, as it does have that Zelda flavor to its storyline and intentions, makes the slingshot a perfect tool. It’s not overly harmful and no one ever thinks about ultra-violence with slingshots.
Anyway, traveling by land/feet will bring a more traditional exploration gameplay design that you’ve seen in other games of this type. Don’t worry, there are some fast travel areas, so you don’t have to go across a set of islands all the time, but you’ll still feel compelled to get around on foot before anything else. There is far more to see this way.
Traveling by Sea
Much like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Link’s dragon boat, Tchia has a boat of her own that requires her to adjust its sails, control the helm, and drop the anchor when she wants to stop its travels. This is a secondary, and quick, way to go between locations and islands. While this early build has some definite bugs in it, for the most part, the sailing was…well…smooth. Not to mention, the ocean view is probably the most visually enthralling part of the Tchia experience. It’s quite breathtaking.
Getting back to the boat, you can quickly go between locations, call the boat up at docks around the island (so you don’t have to go get it after anchoring), and you can stop it and explore deep or shallow parts of the ocean. It’s yet another tool that is not just Zelda-familiar, but also a tool that opens up Tchia in a different capacity. I’m positive it’s going to lead to some great and mysterious items in the final build, and it should. Maybe the sailing isn’t as intricate as Sea of Thieves, nor the rewards for going this route, but certainly nonetheless interesting in its execution and exploration encouragement.
Traveling by Air
Throwing back to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can glide around the islands on a giant leaf. While finite in its usability (meaning that you can’t use it for an infinite amount of time), this mechanic will be used over and over again, much like it was in Zelda or Horizon Forbidden West. It’s easy to use and the mechanic will become vital for traversing large amounts of land in a quick and precise manner. Plus, the idea of floating around is just fun. If you’ve played the above games, then you understand exactly what I mean. It’s fun.
As you can tell, Tchia pays a lot of respect to Zelda titles over the years. It takes some of the most interesting mechanics and uses them with its own style and flair. They also make sense given the world that Tchia lives within and how quickly you want to travel around it to keep the player engaged. More importantly, these mechanics help to support and lift up the exploration intentions that the devs had with this gorgeous title. They picked the right tools to make it fun and use them to stray away from boredom. I can’t wait to see the rest of the finished game and how these work with it.
What you’ll actually be doing
While the underlying story is enough to drive this narrative and push the player forward, the game does contain side quests and collection goals to give you a reason to continue. I found this out right from the get-go with the game’s first encounter with an islander. They demanded we collect specific crabs for them to eat or they wouldn’t give us information. The crabs were located in a specific part of the island, so we had to explore the map to find the exact ones. It didn’t take long and they weren’t too tricky to find. Once obtained, you can pick up the live crab and stow it in your backpack for delivery. Not too difficult of a task.
The only tricky part of this first quest was trying to locate Tchia on the map. In a typical game with a map, the game provides you with the exact location of your main character. Kind of in the same vein as a mall directory. Instead of providing a red dot or some star or anything that represents Tchia, it merely circles where you are in a location. I’m not talking about a small, exact circle, rather I’m talking about a large circle. You can either be irritated by this detail or you can accept it and pin your eyes to shapes and locations on the map so that you can figure out where you might be. It’s a bit of a challenge and I can see this is just extra motivation for you to explore and identify parts of the map, but it can be a bit annoying.
Anyway, outside of quests and the main story, you can also collect items that are listed on the game’s backend. You have certain goals you can achieve as well, such as taking out 33 of the bad guys, not an easy feat. The main part of the gameplay, outside of the story, is simply exploration and completion of quests. It’s not a bad way to treat an open-world game, it worked for Elder Scrolls, and this might be a good game for younger gamers to step into when looking for an innocent open-world experience. It’s nothing too complicated or difficult, but it’s enough to entertain.
Now, when you need a break from these things, you can sit down and play the ukulele. If you need an extra ‘thing’ to do in the game, then this is it. You can play this instrument freely at campfires where you rest, or you can play several games, including entertaining a party at the beginning of the game. The mechanic for the ukulele is impressive, as it comes up with a circular shape that has segmented musical notes on it. If you’re playing a game with the ukulele, then you have to match those shapes with ghost shapes that slide on top of them at certain times in the song. This is much like Guitar Hero, though not as insane. If you aren’t playing a game, and you know the ukulele well in real life, then you can actually use this game to play songs on it. That’s quite cool in my opinion and it offers up a nice little side gig when you’re looking for a break from exploring.
While the above might all be oversimplified, this is the gist of the gameplay design. The game really boils down to exploration, using different types of transportation to get Tchia through that exploration, completing the main story and quests to accomplish, and having a batch of small side games to keep it all fresh. It’s all perfect for an open-world game, and I’m sure we haven’t quite seen everything yet.
Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Tchia is shaping up to be a fun and engaging game that features a variety of goals and quests to complete in a nice open-world backdrop. I can’t wait to see how the game turns out in the end.
Until then we’ll keep an eye on it.
