After playing Outriders for around thirty hours straight—a game of nonstop murdering and looting—I came into Tasomachi: Behind the Twilight. Wiping blood from my face and rinsing flattened bullets from my coat, I blearily stared at the first scene, which showed an aircraft trundling down the coast, and almost started crying.
This is the game for you if you want an eye-catching 3D fantasy setting without having to pay a tithe of blood every minute. It’s an afternoon in the daydreaming mind of an experienced triple-A artist, whose credits include Zelda and Final Fantasy. The work is by Tokyo-based indie nocras, with a score by Youtube star Ujico*. It’s a distillation of lessons learned while composing geography and architecture for grander, more combative experiences. It’s purposefully made to be low-key, with no player deaths, no dangers, and no main objectives other than gathering items. It gives the action a subdued intimacy that subtly overrides the repetition factor. It’s the idea behind Breath of the Wild’s A Short Hike adapted to a community.
Tasomachi’s irrelevance is essential to its allure. You take on the role of Yukumo, a feisty and surprisingly resilient girl with a large hat, whose airship crashes in the town of To-en when she is traveling down the shore. You quickly discover that To-en has perished due to an enigmatic magical fog. A local cat-people tells you that in order to repair your ship, you must remove this curse by collecting Sources of Earth lanterns and obtaining Sacred Tree blessings.
And that’s pretty much it this five-hour story is about. Outside the confines of the game, Yukumo may be anyone—a mercenary, a traveling sage, or a well-known heroine. Sometimes, I would wonder, staring at her unwavering gaze, whether she was, in fact, a villain of some kind, the intrepid arch-nemesis of some grand story about the makers of balloons and vases that you would eventually be asked to smash for puzzle quests. However, she is only a female who gets stopped while traveling someplace else in the game. Sure, she is being expected to rescue the planet, but it’s a little one, and the disaster at hand is actually just a persistent case of unfavorable weather. She is here to assist some cats get their home in order rather than to make huge amends.
Put differently, Tasomachi is a sidequest that has been brought center stage, which may come across as disparaging. But the end effect is that it feels emancipated and meditative in a manner that I frequently forget games can be, even at its most difficult, which is not that difficult at all. It’s similar to the scene in a vintage JRPG when you have to lay low in a town and meditate after the storyline has given you a big kick to the ass. Breathing softly, you go about, sticking your nose into leafy doors and taking in the beautiful piano soundtrack.
It is a game of subtle dungeon and town synergy. There are four independently loaded districts (plus a few lategame places that can only be reached by airship), all of which are initially covered in mist and have blue flames flashing in them to obstruct your path. Here, you will find money, which are mostly needed for clothing and embellishments for the temple in the first region. The lanterns mentioned above also open doorways to Sacred Tree Shrines, where you will engage in more specialized platforming activities.
Once you conquer every shrine obstacle, you may enter the Sacred Tree itself and take out the flames outside and clear the fog. Inside, you’ll find three new abilities: a double leap, an aerial sprint, and a ground pound. Though Yukumo is a floaty avatar and I would have preferred a ledge-grab move, the platforming mechanics and mobility are not Mario-grade. Nevertheless, they’re solid enough, and the considerable camera zoom is useful when exploring larger places. Tasomachi, in any case, allows you to bypass anything that irritates you. You may teleport to the finish line by placing a few coins into a contribution box while touring Sacred Tree Shrines.
Known props like falling or floating platforms, enormous rolling cylinders, tiny networks of teleportation pads, and aerial passages that disappear every few seconds are all present in the dungeon challenge chambers. Most of them are rather easy, but when you return with improved skills, there are more challenging, hidden lanterns to locate. Similarly, the towns transform from dark labyrinths into bright stretches of bridges, temples, and cobblestone roads. These villages are home to feline quest-givers who assign you tasks like pulling weeds or finding (read: ruthlessly destroying) escaping balloons. The music changes, bringing in a day-night cycle to replace the never-ending twilight. Grandfather clocks may also be manually adjusted to show a different time; lanterns are clearly easier to see in the dark.
Even at its cutest moments, Tasomachi is a game that deliberately eschews abruptness and dissonance in favor of soothing gameplay. Some of the nastier urges we take for granted in other games are resisted by it. Zelda-style signage with brief narrative or single-sentence instructions are available to read. One indicator lets you know that you may grab whatever cash you see; don’t worry, you’re not robbing anybody. Additionally, because fallen coins replenish as you leave an area, you don’t need to worry about running out of money. When was the last time you engaged in a 3D exploration game that openly dismissed the idea that resource scarcity influences player behavior, or one that recognized that players would be hesitant to hoard every value they came across?
Compared to looter-shooters like Outriders, who always seem to me to be a bizarre waste of labor—a tangle of gorgeous landscape that is never more than background noise for a slot machine—this mindset is completely different. As the player carelessly tears down structures that took months to create, oblivious to everything save the drop of a purple gear piece, you can’t help but hear the artists moaning in pain. Like the finest platformer collectathons, Tasomachi operates on the opposite premise, with the objects you seek for serving as markers for their whereabouts. These are patches of light that entice you to poke your head above the foliage and explore the cliffside gardens. They serve as a motivator to pay attention to the details and appreciate the work that was put into them.
There are more To-en bustles as you approach the finish line. In the harbor, flat-bottomed boats cruise lazily in circles, while commercial dirigibles soar in the air, often serving as paths to airborne memorabilia. Next comes the ultimate reward: a completely restored airship that you may use to sail over a town transformed into a diorama, collecting the remaining Sources and navigating Pilot-Wings-style obstacle courses via gates perched on hillsides.
It’s a pity that none of the regions ever quite make it to the populated burg that the literature suggests, maybe because to a lack of time and money. Because the NPCs are all quest-givers or elevated signposts, the town is perpetually abandoned and tormented by an unseen mob. There are hundreds of people’s seats available at inns and libraries. In one problem that keeps coming up, you have to kick apart trash bags that careless hoteliers you’ll never meet have left all over the place. Another entails demolishing odd posters with crossed-out lamps; these seem to have been created by a group of fervent reactionaries who are determined to restore the town to its original, misty condition. I left feeling amazed but also a little taken advantage of. To be clear, I haven’t gathered every lamp; maybe there has been a successful town “upgrade” that I haven’t seen.
It’s possible to call Tasomachi a “wholesome” game, but I’m not sure I would want to. Its wholesomeness, in my opinion, has more to do with its awareness of its own insignificance than it does with its adorable character models or tasteful décor. Even while games might be comforting, it recognizes that there are more important things in life than playing them. It wants to be only a little diversion, nothing more. It’s a luxurious world that brings back memories of many cross-continental trips, but it lacks grandeur and is content to let you stay there for as long as you need.