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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: NoHoo Studio/Smile Released: November 7, 2018 Requirements: OS: Windows XP or above Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 2.2 Ghtx/Amd Athlon X2 2.4 Ghtz or higher Memory: Minimum 2 GB RAM; Recommended, 4 GB RAM Graphics: 512 GB VRAM Storage: 2.5 GB available space
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By flotsam NoHoo Studio / Smile From the same studio that gave us the splendid Tormentum (and here’s hoping we might still get Tormentum 2), this couldn’t be more different. Tormentum was macabre, both visually and narratively. The character you play awakes in a cage suspended beneath a zeppelin on his way to a session of torture. It is dark in so many ways. Tsioque by contrast is a small wide-eyed princess, who inhabits a colourful 2D fairy-tale castle. She also ‘wakes’ in less than ideal circumstances, imprisoned in a dungeon by an evil wizard. As evil wizards do, he took advantage of Tsioque’s mum being on a faraway quest to seize control and fill the castle with his minions. Tsioque needs to set things right. She is on her own, but will make some ‘friends’ as she goes. Determined and resilient, she may stumble or get captured more than once, but simply dusts herself off and tries again. And again if necessary. She may need to dodge, or sneak, or run on occasion, but if it all gets too much she may well have the option to skip the sequence in question. In combination with items she gathers, some thoughtful deduction and a bit of trial and error should see her through. Her determination is writ large in her face, as are other emotions from time to time. She doesn’t speak (almost no-one does) but she is expressive nonetheless. Pint sized she might be, but her presence is formidable. The option to skip a sequence was a nice touch. It may be available more often than was apparent. I encountered it twice, after I had spent a bit of time trying to solve a puzzle. One was a bit of actiony running away, the other a much more mundane bit of cutting-out stuff. Each time the game obviously took pity on me, and the option to skip popped up. The running I finished on my own, the fabric I decided to skip. There are a few actiony sequences and a number of other puzzles where I imagine this mechanism may have resulted had I tried and failed more than I did. It isn’t a hard game, not at all an action game, but the fail-safe of a skip option should ensure it is accessible to everyone. You can’t reveal hotspots but the default curser will change in response to something that can be interacted with. Usually this will be a little pointing finger, but might be an eye. The finger is your stock in trade, and is how you gather items and interact with the world. Your inventory purse sits bottom right, and you simply click on it to open and then click on the desired item to then try and use it somewhere. Clicking within certain puzzles might also get Tsioque to (silently) comment on her thinking. Interestingly you don’t move Tsioque around by clicking on the ground. Rather she will walk to an identified hotspot when clicked, or to an exit from the scene (indicated by a pair of legs). Very occasionally those legs will be active within a scene, which will walk Tsioque to that spot, which in turn will likely be part of a puzzle sequence. I did get stuck once or twice wondering what to do next, and failed to find a few items (some are quite small) but by and large it moved along frustration free. The sound effects and score provide the bulk of the soundscape and work well together. The score in particular is a highlight, imbuing the events with just the right amount of evocation. It has that whimsical fairy-tale quality about it, one where giant ducks and zebras and wizards with fiery heads all make perfect sense. It is comical at times, bright and breezy and really rather charming. It is completely point and click and near as I can recall each scene is confined to what you see on screen (i.e., the environment doesn’t slide left or right). It autosaves exclusively on exit and utilises a single save point, which means you just continue where you left off but can’t load an earlier part of the game. Four or so hours should see you through. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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