izigame.me

I really hoped Tchia would be fun, because it’s such a great game on paper, but some poor gameplay design decisions made this game extremely frustrating and dull to play from nearly the first hour onwards. I want to make very clear that there are a lot of things I really do appreciate about this game—Tchia is beautiful, from a graphical perspective, a musical perspective, and also from a cultural perspective. It’s great to see the success of a small indie team making a game about a place they love and sharing its unique culture with the world. More games like this absolutely should exist.
Unfortunately, however, Tchia suffers from a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to the scope of the world, which leads to major gaps in traversal mechanics. Tchia’s map includes two relatively large islands, Ija Nöj and Madra Nöj, as well as a handful of other small archipelagos and shipwrecks. The game’s main storyline leads you on quests across these islands, and there are tons of different collectibles to be found on the islands and all over the ocean. All of this (in addition to the game’s own marketing) suggests that Tchia is a big open-world game. And yet, Tchia wants to be a small, easygoing, cozy game at the same time, so it purposely avoids traversal mechanics that are necessary to make an open-world game work. For example:
For some reason, you can’t see your own position on the map. If you push the left stick (which I frequently did by accident, due to it being the sprint button in 99% of other games—with no option to rebind it in Tchia), your map will recenter to an unhelpfully large circle saying you are “somewhere near here,” which is frequently half the size of one of the major islands. You have a boat you can travel with, but it’s slow, clunky, and difficult to steer—I almost never used it. There are certain docks you can fast-travel to with the boat, but they are also largely unhelpful given that a) there are very few of them, b) they are not close to major areas/villages on the islands, and c) you have to be at one dock to fast-travel to another one, so the time to get there is often not even worth the benefit of fast-traveling.
What I found to be the most effective means of locomotion was soul-jumping, which allows you to inhabit other objects or animals and move as them. Soul-jumping into birds is useful for traversing land, and dolphins for traversing the ocean. There is a limit to how long you can soul-jump for, but you can max this out early on, at which point it’s not a major concern. When you reach a certain point in the game, you unlock the ability to summon some of these animals, which you can then soul-jump into (assuming the summon actually works, which only happened about half of the time for me). This helps tremendously to explore the open world, but there are still issues with it. Any time you exit a soul-jump in order to interact with a collectible or view a cutscene, the animal will likely leave (birds and dolphins can get away quickly), and you will be stuck waiting on a cooldown before you can summon one again. Even after completing the main story, when the game grants you several “overpowered” abilities, there are still long cooldowns for these summons, making them very impractical for large-scale exploration of Tchia’s world. I do generally enjoy “collect-a-thons,” and I’ve 100%ed some much longer and larger than Tchia, but exploration in this game is downright tedious due to the fact that the only remotely efficient means of getting around disappears every time you exit it and you have to wait to summon it again.
I should also mention that Tchia took 6 minutes to boot up every single time I launched it, and around once per hour I encountered a “UE4 fatal error” that crashed the game while I was in the middle of playing. I haven’t experienced anything anywhere close to this bad playing any other game, so I believe Tchia is rather poorly optimized.
I wish I had more fun playing this game, because there are a lot of things it absolutely nails that I hope to see other games take note of, but sadly the gameplay and traversal in Tchia was painfully tedious for me the entire way through, so I can’t recommend playing it. Devs—you’re on the right track. There’s clearly a ton of love put into this game, which is great, and if you can figure out how to improve your gameplay systems, I have no doubt your future games will be fantastic.