Then, when you can no longer rearrange your Resident Evil 4 grid inventory to fit any more tiddlers, you return to the nearest island, sell everything, and create yourself an engine speed or capacity upgrade tiddlers. Classic formula for your standard post-dad game, really: do the thing, get better at doing the thing. The twist to it all comes with a palpable air of underlying Lovecraftian menace. The townspeople keep reminding you not to go out at night as they quietly ooze on your doormat. Semi-regularly, you’ll catch a weird fish with glowing eyeballs on its residual third penis. Could there be something dark and sinister lurking beneath the oily waters of the archipelago? Well, yes, they are giant monster fish. Look, there’s one over there. “Hi guys! I’m a giant fish! Does anyone have, like, a metric ton of ant eggs?” That’s kind of how it feels the first time you meet one The game does a great job of building suspense with warnings from creepy townspeople and the Lovecraft game’s pre-sanity meter that starts fucking you after dark, but when I came across my first organic dump truck of Jacques Cousteau’s fever dreams, it was just kinda there.

It sped around a bend, punched a hole in my hull, and continued on its way. It was less like being confronted with the horror of the sublime than being cut off by an asshole motorist. So the horror felt a bit demystified as I grumbled calling for a tow. Still, the gameplay is put together well enough that I was absorbed. It captures the important post-dad satisfaction of a job well done as you bring your expertly packaged cargo of lime-green seven-testicle crabs to the oozing fishmonger. It’s as if, after a while, the initial horror of the unknown is superseded by some kind of second level horror as you roll your eyes with tolerance when a huge leviathan gabbling from its twelve vaginas green grazes the hull and knocks your trawler net down, and you realize this shit has become way too normal for you. There’s no going back to regular society now, you’ll try to tell your fish stories to the bait shop and they’ll politely ask you to leave so they can all get sick. You’re as much a part of that crazy shit as that magenta seven-clit dogfish you just caught and the plot leans into that.

I would summarize Dredge as a “neat” game. It’s like a strip club in Missouri: there isn’t much to it and I felt a bit disappointed after all the secrets were out. But it’s a very well-organized strip club in Missouri – what there is matches just as well as a beautifully tessellated cargo hold full of exotically colored sea life with an inordinate number of certain body parts. hilarious or otherwise, and it definitely caught my interest. For how long though? Well, half a long video, it turns out. Our second game is Tchia, which is not, as you might think, a game about not holding back a wet sneeze. It’s actually a very heartfelt play on the creators’ love for their home country of New Caledonia, so don’t feel bad about the wet sneeze joke now, you big racist. The main character, Tchia, is a carefree young girl living on a beautiful island with her father whose peaceful life in the middle of nature is interrupted when they are visited by a character I have come to call “the inverted Santa Claus “, whose recurring job in the plot is to show up on a magic helicopter at random times, do something monstrous for no reason, and then piss off again.

So he shows up and kidnaps Tchia’s father, and Tchia is so mad that she turns into a knife. Because she has the ability to possess any animal or small object, and if that’s not a good excuse for a relaxing open-world game, I don’t know what is. I would describe Tchia as a sort of “living in the moment” sandbox. It’s a full Breath of the Wild type traversal game and there are mini-games, challenges and collectibles, in the sense that a circumcision party will have a snack table and a place where you hang your coat, but it’s not really ABOUT those things. What Tchia’s ABOUT is to turn into a bird, fly up a mountain, turn around, come back down on a glider, dive into the sea, turn into a six pack plastic ring and choke a turtle to death and just vibrate, dude. Again, it’s not a very big game, and the plot is all over the place. Tchia makes friends with people mostly by showing off her guitar hero skills, she shows up at Reverse Santa Claus’ office demanding to speak to the manager, then it turns out that Reverse Santa Claus works for an evil worm god who eats babies, then there’s work for a while and Reverse Santa Claus drops a huge bomb that kills 90% of the cast. I think the intention was to have a story that combines contemporary ideas with a Pacific island mythology vibe, which definitely comes through.

But there are times when you feel like grabbing Tchia by the flower necklace and saying, “Pin on a tone, then explain what’s going on.” And if I see you start expressing your feelings in song, you get a ukulele up to the grass skirt. There’s a lot more to choose from, the game has a combat element based on possessing dangerous items and throwing them at evil walking rags and it’s a bit boring because the relationship between arc guideline to throw and where the thing actually goes is more of an acquaintance nodding between two co-workers at a boring office party, and towards the end of the critical path you have to overdo it and the game turns into Fabric Far Cry . But I came away feeling positive about Tchia, so apparently none of that matters a south side plop. I think it’s clearly made sincerely with love and it carries me through its most awkward moments. So the emotional bits managed to itch me with the feel of chips even though I could think back after the fact and realize how kinda fucked up it was. So this is it. Pick up and Tchia. Two island-themed games that I recommend mildly, and if you combine them you get Dredgetchia, which sounds a bit like the name of a country for people who keep getting peanut butter stuck in their teeth .