The Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon: Tamashii
By Mento 0 Comments
To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!
October 31st
I'm... not even sure where to start with Tamashii. I guess a reductive description would be Pony Island passed through several more layers of H.R. Giger-esque heavy metal album cover art where the chief gameplay loop is a puzzle-platformer where you create and leave clones behind to activate switches on your behalf. Its artistic ambitions are a lot more elaborate than that, however, and its aesthetic definitely sits in an uncanny realm of deeply messed up imagery. And this came out on the Switch? Huh.
A nameless creature manifested into being by a deity, your task is to use your borrowed power to cleanse the deity's temple of a corrupting influence. This involves travelling to five different chambers - the first and last are fixed, though the middle three can be taken on in any order - and defeating the guardian that awaits inside. As intimated, you have no weapons nor any way to defend yourself from these abyssal demons but you do have a double-jump and a cloning power: the latter allows up to three clones, each of which exists on a timer that can be accelerated artificially. Most of the game's puzzles involve figuring out where to plant these doppelgangers and when best to extinguish them, navigating past hazards and traps to locate one or more cradle-like devices that open the exit. Boss fights range from using these cradles to damage the boss in the brief windows when you are able to do so, or simply running through a gauntlet of dangers as they menacingly pursue you.
The game seems to be very fond of secrets, and I'm sure I didn't find everything the game was concealing from me. After entering a door found through a secret wall, I accidentally wound up selling my soul to Lucifer (hey, shit happens when you go wandering off the intended path). A Morse code-inspired puzzle gave me a set of numbers that would unlock "extra content," though I was unable to ascertain where to use it. The keys to most of these secrets are kept behind branches in each of the first four chambers: at these branches, you are given the option of a "hard but rewarding" route in addition to the simpler intended path. These harder routes offering some of the toughest puzzles in the game, though it should be said that these puzzles are never too challenging to figure out: perhaps harder to execute upon, though, as some platforming skills are required to get the timing and trap-evading down.
But let's just circle back to that aesthetic for a moment: Tamashii (which is Japanese for "soul": though there's not a whole lot of Japanese folklore touchstones in the way of yokai or Yomi-no-kuni or such, I've read the game was inspired by the likes of Yume Nikki, Saya no Uta, and other surreal J-Horror Indies) is filled to the brim with perturbing creature design, most of which is benign and hangs around in the background though others prove to be dangerous if trifled with. It's fond of hitting you with a visceral jumpscare sequence after each chamber, though given each one is the same it loses some of its bite after a while. The bosses are suitably horrific: fleshy monstrosities that regularly fill the screen and turn the already intense visual filters up to eleven. The story's pure apocryphal nonsense, though germane to the type of world this is with its talk of Biblical demons, demiurges, and cthonic powers derived from an ancient, unknowable "truth." Basically, the first Halloween game I've played for this feature that was genuinely unsettling.
Strip away its visuals and Tamashii is a relatively sparse and brief puzzle-platformer that shouldn't take too long even going out of your way for those harder routes, though of course your mileage may vary depending on your capacity to think chronologically as well as spatially. The platforming controls are satisfactory, though I hit a lot of laggy spots that didn't necessarily correlate to how much was going on in terms of visual filters and other effects that usually tank my framerate on this inadequate system. That issue might not exist for most PC players, or those trying the various console ports that are also available. (If anything, the lag probably helped with a few of the less easily navigable jumps.) However, like Daniel Mullins's Pony Island or The Hex or Toby Fox's Undertale before it, it's less about the totally OK gameplay core and more about the trappings around it: Tamashii is a starkly bizarre and macabre adventure that probably requires content warnings out the wazoo, and really ought to be played to be believed.
- Quality: 4 Stars.
- Spookosity: 5 S.T.A.R.S.
That's going to do it for this year's Halloween content! Thanks for checking in, and if you purchased the Racial Justice and Equality bundle yourselves, feel free to try any of these spooky games yourselves. (I might recommend a stiff drink if you go for Tamashii though, damn.)