Tchia Review

thesixthaxis.com:

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