Tchia is an open world game set in a fictional series of islands, inspired by New Caledonia - a collection of islands that are in the Pacific but remain a French-administered territory. Our latest glimpse at Tchia was light on new details about the game but it still gave us updated looks at the vibrant environments, modes of traversal and cast of characters. Take a look at the trailer below. It seems Tchia has an ability called Jumping that she can use to control any animal or object – the Game Awards trailer had her flopping about as a mango. This ability seems useful for travelling the world in unique ways and solving problems, like opening a treasure chest using a crab’s claws. More natural modes of travel like gliding, sailing, climbing and underwater swimming were also shown off. The trailer gave us a glimpse of some less-supernatural occurrences in the game. Tchia can play the ukulele (ala The Last Of Us Part II’s guitar), explore the island at night with a flashlight (like Alan Wake) and utilise a slingshot (reminiscent of Rockstar’s Bully). Forget DokeV: this is the real game that’s like every other game. All jokes aside, the team at Awaceb is committed to honouring New Caledonian culture. “All characters are voiced in traditional languages by local talent”, said the game’s director. Local wildlife, fauna and environments were also inspired by real world New Caledonia. I was wondering what Tchia meant, but turns out, when you type in “what does Tchia mean?” the first thing you’ll find is a weird website that gives you seemingly randomly generated meanings for names. According to them Tchias are “curious and exploratory” which seems to fit the game. I also found that Chia is an annual plant of the mint family. I wasn’t going to get very far by searching what the name/word meant in English, so I did some research on the languages used in New Caledonia. It turns out French is their most common language, followed by 11 Kanak languages. I had no luck trying to translate Tchia from any of them. I did find this cool map that showed the Ivory Coast had 167 instances of people with the name Tchia, the most in the world in fact. In the end I think I found out that Tchia is probably just a name, but I was left with a lot more useless knowledge floating around my brain. Tchia is due out in 2022 via Steam. You can wishlist it now.
