Tasomachi review – Breath of the Wild's sky-faring little sister

I stumbled into Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight after 30 more-or-less consecutive hours of Outriders, a game of ceaseless killing and looting. Mopping the guts from my face and shaking flattened bullets from my coat, I peered woozily at the opening shot of an airship trundling down the seashore and all but burst into tears.

If you’re looking for an attractive 3D fantasy world that doesn’t require a moment-to-moment tithe of blood, this is your game. The work of Tokyo-based indie nocras with a score from Youtube star Ujico*, it’s an idle afternoon in the daydreaming mind of a seasoned triple-A artist, whose credits include Zelda and Final Fantasy – a distillation of lessons learned while composing geography and architecture for grander, more combative experiences. It’s explicitly designed to be low-key, with no threats, no player death and no major goals beyond collecting things – an action it invests with a quiet intimacy that gently overpowers the element of repetition. It is the thinking behind A Short Hike applied to one of the towns from Breath of the Wild.

Tasomachi: Behind the TwilightDeveloper: Orbital ExpressPublisher: PlayismPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out April 14th on PC

Integral to Tasomachi’s charm is that it’s inconsequential. You play Yukumo, a nimble and usefully fall-damage-proof girl with a big hat, whose airship crashlands in the town of To-en during a trip along the coast. To-en, you soon learn, has succumbed to a mysterious magical fog. One of the resident cat-people advises you that to fix up your ship, you’ll need to lift this curse by gathering lanterns called Sources of Earth and seeking the blessing of Sacred Trees.

And that’s pretty much all there is to this five-hour tale. Outside the game’s world, Yukumo could be anyone – a travelling sage or mercenary, a heroine of repute. There were times when I wondered, looking at her unblinking expression, if she was actually a villain of some kind – the footloose arch-nemesis of some epic narrative involving the creators of vases and balloons, which later puzzle quests ask you to destroy. But within the game, she’s just a girl interrupted on her way to somewhere else. Yes, she’s asked to save a world, but it’s a small world, and the calamity in question is really just a lingering case of bad weather. She’s not here to right any great wrongs, but help a bunch of cats get their house in order.