Thanks to OhNoo Studio for the review code
Title: TSIOQUE
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $13.99
Release Date: 11/07/2018
Story
In this point and click game, you take control of a princess who must deal with the siege of her castle by a dark prince, as she works her escape and navigates around to find a way to stop the dark lord once and for all!
While the game does have a voiced prologue that sets the stage nicely, the bulk of the game is light on dialogue, and instead goes with an early cartoon-ish approach to storytelling, with the characters being expressive and goofy with their reactions speaking for themselves. Expect a lot of glares from the princess.
Presentation
For a point and click, TSIOQUE might seem deceptively basic in still images, with my initial impression of the art style reminding me a lot of your typical animated takes on fairytales. Well, there is a lot of that fairytale energy here, but in motion TSIOQUE is very, very well animated, really feeling like a cartoon come to life. The game’s world connects nicely, clickable objects are pretty easy to identify and spot, and the fail scenes, while incredibly brief, still offer plenty of amusement.
The audio end is otherwise typical. Music that fits the job as background noise, but with nothing too memorable. The sound cues that kick in when certain characters show up are well-done, however, and the very light bits of voiced dialogue in the game are well acted.
Gameplay
TSIOQUE is a point and click, nicely mapped to the right trackpad and right trigger on steamdeck for a very simple control experience. You move, you click, and you sometimes use the left trigger to open your inventory. Thus, the game is clicking around to see what works, what doesn’t, and what sort of solutions/funny things you can find along the way. While I’ve played a good share of adventure games lately, I must say that of all the recent ones, TSIOQUE is the one that reminds me the most of my childhood publisher, Humongous Entertainment, solely because while it isn’t nearly as talky as those silly games were, there are tons of random things to click on each screen of the game.
Some objects don’t do much besides wiggle or do a funny animation/trigger a reaction, but the fact that the game doesn’t just go for the most obvious things and lets you goof off and find some secrets along the way is pretty fun! Even the times I got stuck and tried clicking on everything to brute force my way past a screen, I ended up finding that analyzing every detail and what the mouse cursor icon changed to really helped me a lot here, and just lead to this being a great comfort game to play as I multitasked with watching a Twitch stream or whatnot.
After a short section of intro screens, the game opens up with some branching paths, and this is where TSIOQUE really gets fun. Going around the castle, figuring out what to get to use in a different room in order to progress further and further in yet another room is just fun to goof around with, and there are even occasional mouse-reliant activities that change things up. (such as sewing a broken bag back together)
Considering the worst that’ll happen if you die is being sent back before the fail point and having to figure out how to not get captured/hurt/etc, there really isn’t much anxiety in making an error here, leading to a game that while tricky and capable of stumping you, (as it did me plenty of times, with one solution taking me 40 minutes to figure out) still manages to be pretty fun to play! Once you do figure out the sequence of events, it becomes very satisfying to knock them all out like a row of dominoes.
Conclusion
Of all games in my review queue that stemmed from random Keymailer codes I redeemed shortly before the year that derailed me, Tsioque is the one that I feel the most bad about sleeping on by far, as it’s just outstandingly gorgeous! Reminding me of my very early days in gaming with the Humongous Entertainment catalog, this is a wonderful point and click that’s just a casual delight to play, and one that definitely manages to play just as great as it looks! TSIOQUE is a tricky, yet fun time, and one that manages to push your brain without making you want to rip your hair out, all while looking good every step of the way.
It may have taken a long time to get to this part of the queue as my final pending steam queue game, but what a wonderful adventure title to end this section of the queue on. I can’t really say much more besides nudging you to give this a spin for yourselves if you love point & click adventures!
I give TSIOQUE an 8 out of 10.