Getting lost will be part of the fun.
Upcoming open-world exploration title Tchia’s game director has shared more about how players will move around the game world, including the unconventional decision to not show players where they are on the game’s map.
In a trailer released Saturday covering the Tchia’s “locomotion and traversal,” Game Director Phil Crifo explained how some of the game’s fun factor will be reached by getting lost among the tropical islands, and part of that will be trying to figure out where you are in relation to the map. “We wanted to emulate the excitement of getting lost into a rich, unknown world,” he said during a trailer that was shown as part of IGN Fan Fest. “This is why we designed our map system without a player marker. We think this encourages observation and exploration and makes finding your way around the archipelago much more rewarding.”
The player won’t be left making uneducated guesses as to their location, however. As Crifo describes, the game world contains “orientation signs” with arrows pointing towards different locations posted around the islands, and Tchia herself will sometimes give the player a guess as to where she is, zooming in on a portion of the map and drawing a temporary circle around what may be her general area. The trailer also shows the player manually placing a red push pin into one spot on the map, which is likely a way for players to narrow down their current location.
Of course, getting lost would be a lot harder to do in a world with roads and paths, but Crifo notes Tchia avoids this with its variety of options for getting around. Not only can she climb any surface, “even at weird angles,” but she can hang-glide using giant leaves, quickly slide down sloping hills, and use palm trees as a sort of self-catapult, just to name a few options shown Saturday. That covers land-based travel, but Tchia will also be able to cross the water on a fully controllable raft, and she’ll spend so much time airborne that the developers have put in a number of flip and dive animations to make her freefalls more stylistic.
Of course, all of that is just when Tchia is in her regular human form. One of the major selling points of the game since its first-look reveal back in 2020 is the concept of Soul-Jumping, which the director claims will allow Tchia to “take control of any object or animal in the game world,” apparently even a coconut. Animals shown off under Tchia’s control on Saturday include a dolphin, a parrot, a stag, and a crab, each with their own unique movement abilities.
Tchia has no official release date yet, but it is expected to arrive sometime this spring. An official game page is currently active on Steam.
