A friend once said that the best way to have fun in an open-world game – the best way to see if an open-world game was likely to be fun in the first place – was to pick the first story marker and run in the absolute opposite direction as fast as possible.
Tchia
- Publisher: Awaceb, Kepler Interactive
- Developer: Awaceb
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Out on PC, PS4, and PS5 in 2023
Out of the cave in Skyrim? Head wherever the game isn’t telling you to go. Boots down in Just Cause? Ignore that first invitation to chat with a resistance leader. Emerging from the ramp in Crackdown? Actually, Crackdown never really tells you what to do anyway. Point made.
I’ve followed this advice while playing a demo build of Tchia over the last few days. Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t follow it on purpose. Reader, I was compelled to. Tchia is an open-world game set in a sun-dappled archipelago inspired by New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific Ocean. You play as a child exploring and gadding about the islands, and I’m pretty sure there’s a bit of narrative in the build I played – a quest that leads to another quest maybe, a cut-scene, a gradual introduction to the powers at my disposal.
But you know what? The weather was so lovely, the island earth under my feet so inviting, I just ignored all that and I wandered. I picked a direction and headed out. As such, I know very little about what Tchia is trying to tell players in the first few hours, I suspect. But I also feel like I know a deep truth about Tchia: it’s absolutely lovely – vibrant and characterful and transporting and generous – and when it comes out later this year a lot of people are going to fall for it.
Traversal is an early pleasure. Tchia takes the stamina system from Breath of the Wild and uses its familiarity to create a bunch of lovely new elements. If you have stamina you can run and swim and climb pretty much any surface and glide down out of the sky. The dive-bombing thing from Zelda still works too, where you plummet and then open the chute low to spend your stamina nearer the ground where it will save your life. HALO jumping, or butter scraped over too much toast? (So much of the magic of Breath of the Wild comes down to the unfortunate butter/toast ratio.) No matter – it still works.