WAIT! I wrote this article Jan 17, 2019 and left it to rot on my hard drive until now. I wrote this after I played this game and put it up on my Youtube(link below) Enjoy? Spoilers are present.
Quickly go put on a dress. Now imagine you are a princess waking up in a castle. A dragon has appeared in the kingdom and must be defeated so your mother the queen leaves with a sizable contingent of soldiers to do battle. The royal wizard has remained behind and set in motion a devious plot that transforms the castle from to sinister. You attempt to find a solution but are captured and thrown in prison. You are angry. Really angry. You have a permanent scowl. You are Tsioque.
Tsioque is a point-and-click adventure game created by OhNoo Studio where you play as an upset young lady trying to defeat a wizard. This game is clearly inspired by such a wide variety of adventure games that it would be taxing to name them all here. So I’ll just name a few. You have the fairy tale ambiance from the King’s Quest series as shown by the setting and look. You have the little inklings of sadness and unanswered mysteries that are common in the Broken Sword series. You also have the ever-present death or fail-state potential that brought back memories of being a lowly janitor in Space Quest. I’m also sure this game references Monkey Island in some way but I haven’t yet played those games so let’s pretend for the sake of this article they don’t exist.
Despite these inspirations and/or coincidences Tsioque manages to carve out its own place among the annals of modern point-and-click games. You have the usual mechanics of collecting items, but unlike most games in this genre, you cannot combine items in your inventory. Another unique mechanic for this game is something I’ll call active interaction. Remember the infamous goat puzzle from Broken Sword 1? Remember how you would NEVER KNOW TO DO THAT?! Ahem, apologies. In Tsioque you can click to perform an action, and sometimes immediately after performing that action you can click somewhere else to smoothly switch to do something else. This means you must stay on your toes and pay attention more than you might in some older adventure games.
I appreciate the first puzzle this game starts off with. You must throw your medallion(or necklace) 3 times so a guard will drop his spear, pissing off a many-tentacled monster. Some adventure games wait til you are deeply engrossed in their game before hitting you with a “Hey!! Do this repeatedly before something happens!” and since you weren’t doing that before, you wouldn’t know to do it. But since Tsioque starts off with a puzzle like that you always have it in the back of your mind to keep moving. This game has quite a few timed puzzles, but none so quick that you get flustered and confused. Though Moon Logic puzzles in adventures are almost a hallmark, I don’t think there were any in this game. The hardest puzzle for me was figuring out I needed to sew the bag.
Now the most important part of an adventure game, especially a point-and-click, is the story. Games like these aren’t really action-heavy and require more thought so our motivation needs to be good. Tsioque hands us the sticks as we are prisoners in our own castle. As we explore we see that these guards are causing problems all over the place and must be avoided.
The evil wizard’s presence is felt as he pops up from time to time and later when we enter his study we see that…wait. Something Tsioque does very well is drop little nuggets of information that cause the player to want both the drums and the flats. When you enter the throne room you see a statue of the queen with a few nicks here and there, but the king’s bust is damaged to the point where he has no face. We also see a sad one-eyed bear, which made me sad, and I really wanted to help him out. After the big twist I will say the allure of the story is dampened but the game still remains fun and you will still yearn for the conclusion.
Take off the dress, and put some pants on. This game will take about 3 hours to beat. But it is worth your time, especially if you are a seasoned adventure game player. It will bring to mind past games you’ve and the puzzles won’t piss you off after solving. The gameplay is simple and this game would probably be more fun if player with someone younger, like the classic Torin’s Passage(which needs a sequel). Though the third act is the least best it will still keep you hooked for the thrilling end. Tsioque is a good game.
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