Tchia

Most open worlds are built from a checklist. Tchia is built from a place someone actually grew up in, and the difference shows in almost every frame.

Awaceb is a small studio in Montreal, co-founded by creative director Phil Crifo, who was raised in New Caledonia. The team spent years turning that South Pacific archipelago’s landscapes, music, languages and folklore into a playable story. Kepler Interactive published it, and the game arrived on Steam on March 21, 2024.

The setup is fairy-tale simple. Tchia is a teenage girl living quietly on a small islet with her father. Then the forces of Meavora take him away. Meavora is a tyrant who rules the archipelago through the Maano, creatures made of fabric. Tchia goes to get her father back, and along the way she learns she can leave her own body and take over more than 30 kinds of animals and hundreds of objects.

On paper, that puts Tchia in the line of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: climb anything, glide anywhere, follow your curiosity. In practice it plays more like a travel diary with a toy box attached. The map is small by modern standards and the main story is short. The game cares much more about getting players sailing at sunset playing a ukulele than about upgrade trees or loot rarity.

The cultural detail is what sets it apart. Cutscenes are voiced in Drehu and French, the music draws on local traditions, and the folklore drives the plot instead of decorating it. Very few commercial games are made this close to the culture they show. Tchia earns its distinctiveness instead of borrowing it, and that matters more than any feature on the store page.

• Soul Jumping: Take control of more than 30 animal species and hundreds of objects. Birds fly, fish race through reefs, and a gas lantern becomes a guided firebomb. A soul meter limits how long you can stay out of your body.
• Physics-Driven Traversal: Climb almost any surface, launch yourself from a bent treetop like a slingshot, glide on a scrap of cloth and swim between islands. Momentum and ragdoll physics apply to everything, Tchia included.
• Sailing: A customizable boat links the islands. Wind and waves affect how it handles, so travel is something you do, not a fast-travel menu with a loading screen.
• The Ukulele: Songs you learn change the time of day, change the weather and call specific animals. Key story moments turn the instrument into rhythm sequences with real emotional weight.
• Cultural Grounding: Fully animated cutscenes voiced in Drehu and French, built on New Caledonian folklore, music and tradition.
• Cosmetic Customization: Unlockable outfits, hairstyles and boat parts reward exploring without bloating a stat sheet.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is short and honest. You spot something interesting, work out how to reach it, and choose what to become on the way. By default, the map shows landmarks but not your own position. You find your way by reading coastlines, ridgelines and the compass. That one design decision does more for immersion than any amount of detailed scenery. With no minimap to stare at, the islands have to be learned the way someone who lives there would learn them.

The rewards out there are modest on purpose. Stamina fruit makes your climbing and soul meters bigger. Treasure maps send you hunting for chests based on rough sketches. Rock-stacking challenges and races fill in the gaps. Nothing makes Tchia dramatically stronger, and that’s the point. Exploring is its own reward, and the cosmetics are a bonus, not the reason to go.

The pacing is gentle, close to permissive. There’s no gear treadmill and no level-gated region telling you to come back later. That lowers the barrier for newcomers, but it also means the second half has less tension than the first.

Soul Jumping: The Reason to Play

Soul jumping is the best idea here, and Awaceb knows it. Aim at a creature or object, press a button, and Tchia’s spirit jumps into it. Each animal gives you one or two abilities. Birds give you flight, and gulls can even poop on enemies. Fish move faster than your boat. Larger animals can charge. Objects get more interesting: a rock or coconut you possess can hop around and launch itself, and a lit lantern explodes into fire when it lands.

What makes this clever is that it flattens the usual traversal pecking order. Most open worlds hand out movement tools in a fixed order: glider, then grapple, then mount. Tchia gives you everything at once and lets the world decide what’s available. Need height? Find a bird near the cliff. Need to cross a strait quickly? There’s a fish under the hull. Want to cross a valley in the silliest way possible? Possess a coconut on the ridge and fling yourself.

The soul meter keeps this from turning into nonstop flight. Early on, you can’t stay a bird for long, so the design pushes you into chaining jumps between animals in a way that feels inventive. The catch is that upgrades extend the meter so much that by the late game the limit has mostly disappeared. Getting stronger is satisfying, but the puzzle-like part of moving around fades with it.

Combat and Mission Design

This is where Tchia is weakest. Maano camps are the main hostile content: cloth soldiers guard outposts, and you burn them down with lanterns, explosive objects or fire. The first few camps feel clever. By the tenth, the answer is already known: find a lantern, jump into it, aim, repeat.

The Maano barely react. Their patrols are simple and they put up little resistance once the trick is found. Tchia herself is too fragile for a head-on approach, so fights end up following one plan. Combat exists to give soul jumping a target, not as a system with its own depth. Players coming to Tchia for action will run out of patience quickly.

Story missions mostly have you travel somewhere and talk to someone, with set pieces in between. Some of those set pieces land beautifully, especially the music sequences. Others are escort or chase sections that fight against the physics engine instead of working with it.

Narrative and Tone

The story opens like a children’s adventure and becomes heavier than the bright art style suggests. Without spoiling anything, the relationship between Tchia and her father, and the nature of Meavora’s rule, take turns that hit harder than expected from a game this colorful. The animated cutscenes are made with care, and the Drehu and French voice work gives the characters a warmth and specificity that an English dub would probably have flattened.

The ukulele is the smartest design choice here. At key moments, the game hands the emotional climax to the player as a rhythm performance. You’re not watching a big moment, you’re playing it, note by note. It’s a small design choice with a big payoff, and it’s the part of Tchia people tend to remember.

Physics: Charm and Jank

The physics engine cuts both ways. Ragdoll tumbles down hillsides are built for comedy. Snagging on scenery during a timed objective is the other side of that coin. Climbing is forgiving but imprecise, and the boat’s collisions with rocks look more like a bug than a choice. In free exploration, the jank adds personality. In structured missions, it’s friction.

Tchia’s art direction is stylized, saturated and confident. It doesn’t chase realism, which is the right decision for a small team. The water is the standout: turquoise shallows fade into deep blue, and coral shows through the surface as you sail over it. Sunsets bathe the islands in orange and violet, and switching time of day with the ukulele turns the light into something you play with, not just scenery.

Characters have simple shapes but expressive animation, especially in cutscenes. The interface stays out of the way, with sparse menus and radial wheels for the ukulele and items, which suits a game about looking at the world instead of at overlays.

On the technical side, Tchia is solid but not a showcase. The engine is built to run on modest hardware, which suits a game of this scope, but it shows its budget in dense areas: distant foliage and objects are designed to pop in, and busy villages with heavy physics moments are where the engine is working hardest. None of it undermines the experience, but the technology is clearly running closer to its limits than the art direction would suggest.

On Steam, Tchia is clearly a game designed for a controller first. Climbing, gliding, sailing and especially the ukulele wheel are built around analog sticks, and playing notes on a thumbstick is the kind of input a keyboard can’t match.

Mouse and keyboard do have one real advantage: aiming. Lining up soul jumps and slingshot shots is the kind of task a mouse handles more precisely, which matters during Maano camps. Sailing, by contrast, is designed around the subtle steering of an analog stick.

The modest system requirements make it a natural fit for handheld PCs like the Steam Deck. It’s a relaxed, short-session exploration game, which is exactly what handhelds suit. At $7.49, it’s priced fairly for a complete experience, longer if you chase every chest and cosmetic.

Tchia succeeds where most open-world games fail: it makes the place itself matter, not the completion percentage. Soul jumping is a genuinely fresh mechanic that solves traversal in a way bigger studios haven’t tried. And a culture that games almost never show sits at the center of the story, not off to the side.

It isn’t a complete package. The combat is a single idea used too often. The missions lack ambition, and the physics often works against the structured parts of the game. A bigger budget might have fixed those weaknesses, but it would probably also have sanded off the personality that makes Tchia memorable.

What’s left is a focused, sincere game about an island and the people who belong to it. We recommend it to players who bring patience and curiosity and leave their expectations about combat at the dock — for them, it repays the trip.