Well, that was a strange game. I wanna call it “Assassin’s Creed for babies,” but it’s not necessarily an appropriate game for kids. If you read the Steam forums, people will have you believe that it’s not appropriate, because the main character is gay and at one point kisses another girl. If that bothers you, then I don’t know what to tell you except to get a life. For me, what makes it inappropriate is the amount of violence hidden behind the cutesy presentation. Like, the first time you meet the villain, she eats a baby! At the very end of the game, you do find out that all of the “eaten” children are actually okay, but damn, for 90% of the game I really thought that baby was dead! There’s also a scene where a bad guy gets his hand cut off, and the protagonist flips him off afterwards. It’s really weird to see things like that in a game that presents itself so innocently.
Gameplay-wise, Tchia is a pretty basic and easy open world that takes place across two small islands. I like this as a setting, but it’s just not that interesting to explore. The islands don’t have much to see/do on them, and getting around is a pain in the butt. Why even have a stamina bar that you can increase if you can’t run?! You have a boat that travels pretty fast in the water, but the docks where you would retrieve it aren’t in convenient locations. I liked the soul jumping ability, though, that lets you possess different animals and objects. To cut down on travel time, you can often soul jump into a bird and fly over the island until your soul juice runs out. The other limitation that I found really annoying was the map. They wanted the map to feel realistic, so it never shows your exact location, but you can still drop a pin on the map, and your compass will point to it. They should have just gone all in on the “learn to read a map” angle, or had a normal game map. This half-measure won’t make anyone happy.
I also need to point out that this has possibly the worst introductory section I’ve seen in a game since Tears of the Kingdom. There are so many cutscenes and minigames crammed into the first hour that I think many people would be justified in abandoning the game early on. I guess I’m glad I stuck with it, though, and played ’til the end. Not that this was an amazing game by any means. I haven’t said very nice things about it so far, after all. But I do like smaller scale open world adventures, and there are some fun moments to be had. For instance, there’s a series of treasure maps that don’t outright tell you where the next one is, so it takes a bit of thought and studying the overworld map to progress. And infiltrating some of the bigger enemy bases gave me nostalgic flashes of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Of course, that is a far superior game, and also significantly larger. Tchia only has about 10 hours of content, excluding going for 100%, and that’s about all I was willing to put in, anyway.