Essence of the Tjikko unearthed in Prologue release

Written by Jack Allin — March 13, 2022 at 09:51

Plants have an innate ability to stretch towards the sunlight for nourishment, so it's only natural that a newborn plant-based game protagonist would seek to do the same, as we can see for ourselves in La Revria Studio's recently released introductory prologue of a new fantasy adventure series called Essence of the Tjikko. 

In a world "where plants and technology are one," an ancient civilization was forced to take refuge from disaster beneath "the great tree of life," the titular Tjikko. There they tried to reproduce the natural conditions aboveground but "without sunlight their population eventually withered away." The last remaining survivor is a hybrid plant child "preserved in the sap of a forbidden meta-botanical experiment." Players control the young humanoid protagonist who awakes "with no memory of its origins" but is "driven by the instinct to find the light of the sun." Now, accompanied by a "strange dragonfly hummingbird," you must begin a journey of both growth and disovery as you make your way through Tjiko's majestic roots in hopes of finally reaching the surface, uncovering the great tree's many secrets along the way. 

Created by a former Ubisoft artist as a "love letter to 2000s 3D games," Essence of the Tjikko is a third-person adventure whose prologue will send players through an "old school Zelda-like 3D dungeon" consisting of seven floors and more than thirty rooms filled with puzzles to solve and traps to evade. There you'll encounter a wide variety of "really weird" plants that can take the form of "computers, doors, cable cars, bridges, chairs" and more. The challenges will be largely cerebral, with "several solutions per puzzle," but the protagonist's physical abilities will be central to the experience, requiring you to "run, jump, climb, swim, push and pull" your way past the various obstacles in your path. Doing so, however, consumes energy that will "gradually regenerate" over time. In order to boost his proficiency, you can "collect fruits that will maximize his regeneration, but also modify his state (his temperature and his humidity)" and even temporarily alter his base statistics, affecting such things as his speed and jumping prowess.

Although just "the first part of a bigger story," the prologue of Essence of the Tjikko is intended to be a standalone experience taking between one to two hours to complete, and is available now on Steam for Windows PC.