Tchia is a Wide-Open Sandbox Indie Game made by Awaceb and published by Kepler Interactive that was released on March 21, 2023 for the PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. It was later released on Nintendo Switch on June 27, 2024 and Xbox Series X|S on July 11, 2024. The game was greatly inspired by New Caledonia landscape and culture.

It tells the story of the titular Tchia, a young girl who lives on a small island with her father Joxu, when upon her 12th birthday her father gets kidnapped by a man named Pwi Dua. Determined to save him, Tchia sails toward the main islands of her archipelago while using the power of Soul Jumping, which allows her to possess and control objects and animals.

Tchia contains examples of the following tropes:

• 100% Completion: The game has loads of collectibles to track for you that are scattered all over the game world: 180 Braided Trinkets, 80 Clam Pearls (both of which can be traded for various clothing items at 12 Cosmetics Boxes), 95 valuables chests, 16 Race challenges, 5 Diving Board Challenges, 5 Shooting Ranges, 7 rock balancing challenges, 33 Maano camps, 2 claw machines, 36 campfires, 10 docks, 10 Meavora statues, 8 Totem Shrines, 58 Stamina Fruits, 15 points of view, and 21 treasure maps. And if that's not enough yet, you can still try to find every type of flora and fauna in the game.
• Absurdly High Cap: Tchia's energy and her Soul Meter can be extended way higher than actually necessary, as you'll have to explore every nook and cranny of the game world to do so and there isn't really much of a need for such high abilities either.
• Advanced Movement Technique: Soul Jump into an object, shoot it, and immediately Soul Jump back into the object. Doing that a few times in succession enables you to traverse the map way faster than with any other means of transportation. It also yields an achievement the first time you do it.
• All Swords Are the Same: The various explosives Tchia can collect and throw all more or less have the same explosion radius, whether you throw an oil lamp, an explosive fruit, or deadly dynamite.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The main rewards of the game are various clothing, hairstyle, or backpack options that Tchia can wear. Some collectibles such as pearls and braided trinkets serve almost no other purpose than to be traded for clothing items.
• Antidote Effect: Fruits and other food items can replenish Tchia's Soul Meter by one unit, but keeping them in your inventory consumes valuable space that should better be filled with explosives, totems or trophies.
• Anti-Hoarding: Tchia can only carry up to eight different items at a time, with no options to increase this cap. As such, hoarding up on resources such as explosives or trophies is rarely worth it.
• Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: You can carry, stow, or Soul Jump into various items such as rakes, spades, or binoculars, but you can't use either of them. You cannot use a spade to defend yourself, and you cannot use a binocular to see in a distance. All you can do with these items is throw them (which has no effect on anything) or jump around with them.
• Artistic License – Biology: The game takes some creative liberties in the abilities of certain animals. For instance, crabs are able to pinch through massive steel chains.
• Be the Ball: In the Shrine in Hnapapa, Tchia is transformed into a spiky ball and must reach the goal in that form, reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball.
• Bittersweet Ending: Meavora is finally defeated and the numerous children he consumed are finally freed while Pwi Dua has been stopped. But numerous people have died during their reign on the archipelago, including Tchia's dad and Louise's mom. And Tre sacrificed himself to save Tchia's brother after Pwi Dua mortally wounded him.
• Body Surf: One of the main mechanics of the game. Tchia can control objects and animals to achieve multiple goals, such as flying, digging or destroying obstacles.
• Bonus Feature Failure: After beating the story, you unlock the ability to spawn the mythical Xetiwa bird and possess it. However, it's pathetically slow, way slower than normal birds, and as such is pretty much useless.
• Bookends: The game kicks off with Tchia meeting her father on top of the big rock arch at the south of Uma island and screaming down from it. It ends many years later, with Tchia meeting her spouse Louise on top of the same rock arch, and again she's screaming.
• Cardboard Prison: Failing to escape the Maano soldiers in a soldier camp causes Tchia to be thrown into a wooden prison cell. It would possibly be hard to escape... if Tchia didn't have her Soul Jump ability and could simply use it to warp somewhere outside of the cell.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: In the shrine in Pûrû Bibiu, Tchia needs to reach her goal without being seen by a mysterious red laser. She needs to hide in certain zones where she cannot be spotted by the light, i.e. in the shadow.
• Death of a Child: Subverted at the end of the game, when Tchia's twin brother is brutally murdered by Pwi Dua using a machete. And he's an infant, mind you. However, Tre gives his life force for the the brother and dies himself in the process, whereas the Twin Brother survives.
• Developer's Foresight: At one point in the game you're tasked to take pictures of a factory so that a boy can hack them and find their weaknesses. Should you find the weaknesses yourself, the boy has unique dialog where he praises you for it.
• Distant Finale: The story ends with an elderly Louise joining an elderly Tchia the morning after telling Tchia's story to the kids. After mourning on the tombs of Joxu, Tre and Kavere, the two elder women share a moment together as they watch over Uma.
• Eats Babies: Meavora regularly eats babies or children and his first noteworthy action once on screen is to eat a newborn. This is how one NPC words it:
  They say he eats babies! Just in case you were wondering if he's really the bad guy.
• Fake Longevity: Fast travel is limited to certain ship docks; you can only fast travel from one ship dock to another. That's still all fine, but all ten ship docks are on the two main islands. Uma and Ieji Sinöe, the two most remote islands in the game, do not have a single ship dock, so if you want to revisit them, you cannot fast travel - and you will easily spend five minutes on the boat one-way, doing nothing.
• Fashion-Based Relationship Cue: At her coming-of-age ceremony in the tutorial, Tchia is given a flower to wear behind her right ear, signifying that she's not in a romantic relationship. After her first kiss with Louise, Louise moves the flower to Tchia's left ear, signifying that they're a couple.
• First-Person Snapshooter: Tchia receives a camera from Louise that she can use to take various pictures. It becomes necessary to infiltrate the factories at the end of the game.
• Friendly, Playful Dolphin: Tchia can soul jump into dolphins as well as sharks; only the latter are able to bite, whereas the dolphins are completely peaceful and the most they can do is jump out of the water playfully.
• Give Me Your Inventory Item: In the first half of the game, a lot of the main quests boil down to this: Collect various items, then hand them over to the NPCs.
• Grand Theft Me: Tchia can take over various animals and objects with her Body Surfing ability, which lets her copy their abilities and traverse great distances way faster.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Rather than health, eating instead fills Tchia's spirit meter, which allows her to use her body surfing powers. Food can be fruits and vegetables found around the islands, or delicious-looking meals from the various food stands
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Discussed and averted. After Meavora has been reduced to his harmless wood worm form. Tchia and the others start discussing what they should do to him...before Heia takes initiative and just squishes him.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Time passes from day to night, and Tchia can also use her Soul Melody ability to set the time to dawn, noon, evening, or midnight. The time effect is merely aesthetic though.
• Last Lousy Point: The game falls to the easier end of the Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking, meaning every collectible is firmly marked on the map. However, clearing the Soldier Camps around the four factories can still be this trope: You'll have to track down and kill between 15 and 35 paper soldiers, and they can be anywhere in a rather vast area. If you're only missing one, the camp will not be counted as cleared.
• Missing Mom: Tchia grows up with her father peacefully on Uma island, but her mother is nowhere to be seen.
• Mooks, but No Bosses: The game features combat against the Maano Soldiers, but there is no true boss battle.
• Narrator All Along: The ending reveals that the storyteller telling the story of Tchia to the kids is an old Louise.
• Non-Combatant Immunity: The Maano soldiers will only spawn on the map once you've learnt how to Soul Jump and therefore giving you the means to fight back. Before, the game world is entirely peaceful.
• Not Quite Flight: Tchia receives a paraglider from her dad that lets her fall down great heights safely.
• Orcus on His Throne: Despite being a literal god and having powers that allowed him to take over the archipelago among other things, Meavora lets Pwi Dua and the Manu do the heavy lifting to maintain his control of the archipelago, crack down on dissent, and to bring him children to eat.
• Orphanage of Love: The story starts with one boy arriving at a kindly orphanage and slowly settling in until he is invited to hear a story related by one of the caretakers alongside the other children. As it turned out, it was the orphanage that Kavere, Tchia and Louise created on Uma. Louise and Tchia are still caretakers there, decades later.
• Permanently Missable Content: There is thankfully nothing preventing you from reaching 100% Completion, but at the end of the game, all Maano soldiers are replaced with Henchmen, mysterious soulless enemies at service of Pwi Dua. If you have already cleared every enemy camp on the map, you won't be able to ever see this second type of enemy.
• Pun: Many of the unlockable Soul Melodies have one. They consist of four notes, but they also form meaningful words at times:
  • The melody to invoke dawn is "C-A-F-E" like the drink, for noon it's "D-A-E-E" as in "day", and the midnight melody is "B-E-E-D" as in "bed".
  • The melody to attract animals is "F-E-E-D", as if you'd give them food to do so.
  • The melodies to spawn a certain animal sound phonetically close to what you spawn: "D-A-A-G" for dog, "C-A-A-B" for crab, "B-A-A-D" for bird, and "D-A-F-A" for dolphin.
  • The only spawnable humanoid creature that you can spawn, the Mwaken, is called with the melody "F-A-C-E".
  • The melody for spawning an explosive fruit is "B-E-E-F", likely from the phrase "to have a beef with someone"
• Puppy Love: Tchia and Louise eventually become romantically involved, despite Tchia being 12 and Louise's age is implied to be around Tchia's.
• Ragdoll Physics: Whenever Tchia falls from greater hights and doesn't land on her feet, she is thrown around with this, although she barely gets damage from any head traumas she might suffer. Many soul-jumped enemies likewise receives ragdoll physics when they fall from certain heights.
• Secret Handshake: Played for Laughs: Tchia and Youl attempt to shake their hands in a cool way, but whatever move you select, Youl will always take a different one, and as such the handshake never works out. After a few second, you receive a prompt to press A in order to, literally, "end the suffering".
• Small, Secluded World: Uma, the island where Tchia and her father lives is a small island far away from the rest of the archipelago. It's implied that Tre is their only contact with the outside world as the pair seems to be mostly self-sufficient otherwise.
• Terrifying Tiki: Invoked. As the game takes place in Melanesia, carving them is a natural part of the islanders' lives. Tchia herself can carve Tikis which, if carved correctly, grant her entry to the Totem Shrines.
• The Three Trials: In order to stop Meavora's plans, Tchia must disable three big factories spread across Madra Nöj, before she can tackle the central one.
• Tropical Island Adventure: The game is set in a tropical archipelago directly based on a real archipelago, the Loyalty Islands in New Caledonia.
• Umpteenth Customer: After Tchia goes through row and row of administration forms to have an audience with Meavora, Tchia gets rebutted and asked to gather offerings to do the Coutume with him. When she is about to leave the next person to ask an audience turn out to be the 1000th allowing him to have a free pass to meet Meavora, much to Tchia's consternation.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Tchia can pet every animal in the game, "even the scary ones!", how a tooltip describes it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The Soul Jumping ability leaves a lot of options to be mean to the various animals. You can store smaller animals (up to the size of cats) in your backpack indefinitely, and there is nothing stopping you from doing things such as throwing dogs off cliffs, making birds fly headfirst into a campfire, dropping a dolphin in the middle of an island, or a cat in the middle of the ocean. Thankfully, all animals are invulnerable in the game.
• Womb Level: One of the last areas in the game takes place inside Meavora's belly. You are tasked to destroy his heart for him to die.