Whether it’s Alba teaching kids about the importance of conservation or Duolingo incentivising language learning with XP and a leaderboard, games and gamification can be a fantastic educational tool. However, for them to succeed at this, the game needs to have three core qualities: it needs to be accurate, it needs to be engaging and it needs to be well-paced. Awaceb’s new game Tchia, a game inspired by New Caledonia, hits on one of those marks, trips over the second and falls flat at the third.
You play as Tchia – a young girl living her best island life when a group demons kidnap your father. Led by the diabolical Meavora — the ruler of the archipelago — and his warlord henchman, these demons are made of tribal masks and magical cloth. Armed with a slingshot, a glider and the ability to soul jump into things (regardless of whether they traditionally have a soul), your mission is to stop Meavora at all costs.
There is obviously a lot of poetic license here, but the game borrows heavily on local customs and culture, it is voiced by local actors in the local language, and it provides a unique insight into a way of life that is so far removed from mine in the South East of England that I really, really wanted this game to be excellent. I wanted to sit down, be immersed in a culture I know little about and enjoy a cool new story in the process.
Sadly, this was not going to come to pass.
Tchia’s biggest issue is its pacing. It is phenomenally slow to start; despite a high-octane cutscene where you soul jump into a machete (not notorious for having souls) and fling yourself at the warlord’s face as he absconds with your father. The issue is that what follows is a whole bunch of sitting around campfires and singing (admittedly charming) songs before shlepping across mountains wishing this tropical paradise had a few more animals you could hijack.
Given that your dad has just been kidnapped by a half-worm, half-human demon who eats babies, why does Tchia keep sitting down to play the ukulele as everyone has a dance? It would be one thing if these songs actually meant something mechanically or in terms of stats building, but it just adds a rhythm game for you to play along to, and auto-complete button and skip buttons for when you get bored. It’s good to have this option here, but at the same time means that more could have been left on the cutting-room floor.
Through learning different songs, Tchia also has the magical ability to change time of day and summon animals to help her get around the world she inhabits. While this seems incredibly helpful, it comes with frustratingly long cooldowns — yet you still wait through them because it’s always faster to summon a bird than to start walking. There is a mechanic here for flinging yourself between trees to keep up momentum, but you don’t quite get the reach you want when trees aren’t densely packed enough, and soul jumping between wildlife is difficult when the island is less densely populated. In all, everything feels like it fell a little short of the mark.
Like most open-world games, there is fast travel, but it’s the worst kind of fast travel — the kind where you have to first hike over to a fast travel point to warp to somewhere that’s not remotely close to where you want to be. None of this helps the pacing, and it makes traversing the island feel like a chore more than the fun island-hopping experience it could have been.
Putting this glaring issue aside, Tchia gets full marks for accuracy, what with the local customs and talent being rolled into production, and the game is engaging when it wants to be.
Tchia is a likeable character and the background story is pretty cool if you can get into it. It’s just a shame that dips in quality hinder the overarching experience, and weird little quirks make certain things feel a little disingenuous. One case in point is that someone has been leaving braided trinkets on little shrines around the archipelago, seemingly as offerings. Your side mission is to run around stealing them to gift to other people to progress the story. While many games encourage kleptomania in the player, I can’t imagine that’s really a side of New Caledonian culture that Awaceb was trying to showcase.
Other quirks include Tchia climbing the wall next to a ladder because she couldn’t figure out what a ladder does; mini-games filling your inventory with junk trophies so you can’t pick up things you actually need (making me not want to do the mini games because of this); and the fact that your map doesn’t actually show your precise location, despite Tchia actually knowing precisely where you are since you can pin destinations to your compass.
Playing on a mid-spec PC, the game suffered from a poor frame rate with the game also occasionally tripping up with backgrounds not loading and invisible enemies we couldn’t kill. The game’s art direction is cute and cartoony, but it also comes off as low-quality in some parts of the open world.
