Tchia Review (Minion)
I had a lot of fun playing Tchia and I definitely recommend it. The graphics are beautiful and music plays a big role in this game. You get to play different instruments from time to time and the songs are mostly in Drehu which makes them even more unique and nice to listen to. If you want to fully enjoy the music and the visuals, you can turn on autoplay and Tchia will play her instruments automatically. The voice-overs are primarily in Drehu as well which is great for immersion. In general I learnt a lot about a culture and language that I didn't know before and you could see right from the start that the devs have put a lot of love into this game. I also enjoyed the story, it was touching and honestly not what I expected, but I was surprised in a positive way. Being able to explore the world as an animal (mostly birds, deer and dolphins in my case) or different objects such as oil lamps or coconuts is an amazing feature, I love this idea, but unfortunately it doesn't always work perfectly fine. I'll elaborate on this a bit later.
Despite all the positive aspects, there are some issues that have also been mentioned by other people. First of all, the game always took more than five minutes to start. It's not a huge problem, but pretty annoying when you don't have a lot of time to play. Some people complained about the game being too brutal and I cannot fully agree. It's probably not the right game for an 8-year-old, but you can actually turn on "Family Mode" in the settings which should "reduce the intensity of some specific scenes", although I haven't tested it because imo there are some scenes in Ghibli movies or even Spongebob that are way more disturbing. You shouldn't give a game a negative review for something that you are able to turn off in your settings, it's not really fair.
While soul-jumping is the most convenient way to travel and in the settings there is actually an option to be able to soul-jump without limits, it can also be quite annoying. Sometimes you have to jump out, for example to pick up objects, but by the time you're ready to soul-jump back into the animal that you used before, it will have run away. This kind of ruined the feature because the world is big but empty at the same time, so sometimes you have to run around for like five minutes to find a new animal for travelling. This brings me to another issue, the biggest one for me. It took me 8.5 hours to complete the story and there's no incentive to further explore the world (unless you really wanna go for that 100%) which is sad because the game has a lot of potential. Probably some more side quests would have done the trick.
For these reasons, I strongly recommend getting the game in a sale. It's definitely worth playing but probably not worth the full price.