The Touryst - Review

I wasn't sure I was getting myself info with the Touryst, all I knew going in was that it was very blocky and they had misspelt the word tourist, but given the developers pedigree at creating some truly amazing titles I was willing to forgo the spelling mistake and see where this adventure took me.

There is very little in the way of set up, you literally arrive on a boat at an island and begin to explore, the island isn't even that big, a couple of houses, a shop and off in the distance massive stone monument. Talking to the people on the island which, for some reason includes a single lifeguard, you find out that there's not much to do, but if you go and explore you can find plenty to do; The only real place to explore though is in that monument, so off you go. Once you've achieved success and obtained away in, you quickly learn that there are other monuments on other islands located throughout the world, and it's these islands that you have to visit in order to discover the truth, what that is for you to discover I'm not going to say anything. In terms of overall story the game has very little, but as the game is more for adventure the minimum that it offers, seems appropriate.

As this is an adventure game exploration is key, and much like many games of this genre you're not an all-powerful being equipped with every conceivable tool required for exploration, in fact don't even know how to run. This is one of the cool loops at the game offers for you, as you explore new islands, more upgrades will be available back at the shop on the 1st island and like games in the Legend of Zelda series, you'll usually obtain a move just ahead of when you need it. This is not to say that they are one and done skills, because they many uses for them in the regular world, should you know where to apply them and that is part of the fun. Once you obtain the ability to run, which is something you have to pay for, things start to get going and not just because you can move faster, thankfully though the game doesn't hold your hand at that point, it lets you off leash and this is where more puzzles come into play.

One of the earlier puzzles requires you to provide a cool drink to a hot and overworked tour booth operator, sadly though in order to provide the drink, you need to provide the ingredients to the drink stand and to obtain the ingredients you have to explore the island. This is a very point and click adventure puzzle trick, where in order to achieve one single goal you have to complete a handful of smaller ones and each time I managed to mark one more item off the checklist, I got rewarded with a sense of satisfaction. It's not just puzzles in the overworld that you have to deal with, each of the monuments contain their own smaller puzzles, some are one room endeavours, while others are not boss fights, but contain that sort of element. While the puzzles do have one way of solving them, the game never gets in the way of you experimenting letting you decide hey this is the way I'm going to try and solve it, you might be wrong but the game lets you find that out for yourself, which is nice.

Of course because the game is now being supported on the Xbox Series X, we have to talk about the presentation, And while you might think that a game that probably looks more like digital Lego would take advantage of a next generation console you'd actually be surprised. The game was initially of course created for the Switch and its visual appeal reflects that, when the game was first brought over to Xbox One and PC a few months ago it got the bump to support 4K and now that it's come to Series X, honestly not much has changed. The game does a very clever thing where it actually runs at a higher resolution but outputs it downscaled to 4K, meaning you're going to get the best looking version of the Touryst on the next generation of consoles, but again the game's overall visuals don't really demand much, so they're not pushing it too much. Sadly, I couldn't test out the 120fps mode, purely because my TV does not have the necessary input that the Xbox Series X requires, but honestly the game looks fine now and it is locked to 60fps.

The Touryst is a game that I honestly highly suggest anyone with Xbox Game Pass acquire day one, it is calming, it is simple, but most importantly it is just relaxing, which might be an odd thing to say about a game. It's not going to push your brand-new Xbox and that's fine not every game has to do that out of the gate, but you're going to get a really good game with unique visuals and a lot of charm and that's honestly enough.

The Score

8.0

Review code provided by Xbox

The Pros

+Straight forward fun

+Visually manages to be simple, yet oh so charming

The Cons

-Not a whole lot of game here

-Upgrades for Series X won't be available to most players