You need to play this charming indie before it leaves PlayStation Plus

26.02.2024 - 19:13 / digitaltrends.com / Tomas Franzese

Tchia will leave the PlayStation Plus Premium and Extra game catalog on March 19. And you really need to play this charming open-world adventure that I called “a new coming-of-age classic” in a four-star review before it’s gone.

Released in March 2023, Awaceb and Kepler Interactive’s Tchia is an open-world indie adventure heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda titles like Breath of the Wild and The Wind Waker. It stands out by transporting players to a world inspired by the Pacific islands of New Caledonia and immersing them in its vibrant culture and mythology while telling a captivating coming-of-age story.

That it released just a couple of months before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom meant that this game flew a bit under the radar following its release. But with Tchia leaving PS Plus in a couple of weeks, you have ample reason to revisit or discover this game.

Tchia follows the titular character, a young girl whose father is kidnapped on her 12th birthday. Although she’d lived most of her life in isolation, her journey to stop Pwi Dua and Meavora and save her father brings her to new islands and villages where she forges friendships and relationships and learns to handle grief and take responsibility for her future. It’s a heartfelt story that’s not afraid to get dark at times — one of the main villains eats a baby at one point — but Tchia also keeps the adventure vibrant, colorful, emotional, and wondrous.

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This is a game I’ll still turn on and play for a few minutes, even almost a year after reviewing it, to vibe with the beautiful world Awaceb created. Tchia is a game where it’s fun to interact with everything you come across just to see what you can do and where you can get to. Climbing is a stamina-based system like in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, but Tchia also makes it easy to swing from tree to tree. It’s satisfying to get across a large chunk of the map by launching myself off a tree on a cliffside and then paragliding down from there. You can even go sailing, swimming, and diving too.

Players can also possess objects and animals in Tchia, which gives players new abilities like flying as a bird or opening locks with a crab’s claws. While it takes full advantage of those systems when it comes to puzzle and mission design, I still appreciate them as a set of tools that makes exploration even more entertaining. Add in a map that only gives players a vague idea of where they are, not a precise location, and an open world scattered with beautiful vistas, neat