Tala is a gorgeous indie point-and-click adventure game like nothing you’ve seen before.
The first thing you’ll notice is the amazing artwork. It looks like it was hand-drawn in a professional studio and put together by an AAA developer- no joke. The game takes place in a variety of scenic environments that are all completely inspired by nature photography. The artwork, background, foreground, and even your character are all crisp and clear with a unique art style.
Aside from the artwork, now I have to talk about the animation. The game uses traditional animation techniques that make it look like something from the early days of cartoon animation- think Cuphead, Don’t Starve, Bendy and the Ink Machine, or something. Combine that with gorgeous artwork and you have something worth drooling over. It’s digital animation but uses old-school techniques.
Tala is the name of the game and also the name of the character you play as. She’s a forest spirit who hasn’t exactly found her place in her hometown yet. You’ve been helping the Town Guardian prepare for their treck into the Deep Woods so they can gather liquids for the winter. When they left, your job was to make sure the townspeople stay out of trouble until the Town Guardian comes back.
However, the Baker needs fruit to make fruit pies. The Sproutlings are too troublesome. And the Inventor is doing his own thing. This was repurposed from the game’s intro description and you can see that it’s just an awesome adventure waiting to happen!
The game doesn’t use any dialogue at all. From the demo, you can see that the game uses icons and images to convey thoughts and actions through animations. It’s cute and effective and also breaks down the language barrier so literally, anyone can play it.
When you talk to NPCs int he game, they bring up these little dialogue trees and puzzles you can use to choose what you want to “convey” to them. This is pretty awesome and makes it stand out from text-based point-and-click games that we usually see- if you don’t like reading lots of dialog, this is your game.
There’s also a bunch of characters in the demo that you can interact with. The town literally has one character for each role- kind of like what you’d expect when you were still in preschool. It’s cute and adorable.
The environments are all incredibly detailed with nice animations. You can click on nearly everything and interact with them- even if it’s just for shiggles. You can click on a chimney and smoke comes out. You can click on a window to toggle its position. You can click on pretty much everything in the game and something will happen.
It’s like those old-school Roger Rabbit learning games you grew up with. And some of these items are necessary to click on because you need to interact with them to solve a puzzle. The cursor automatically shifts between different modes depending on what you’re hovering over.
The puzzles are pretty easy from what I’ve played so far, and there are plenty of them. They’re the regular point-and-click style puzzles where you need to collect an item and use it on another item. It’s exactly what you’re used to if you’ve played games like this. They’re pretty intuitive and not too tricky, but finding the items when you have no idea what to look for is the fun part.
The environment, music, and art, and animation are all spot-on and make this an indie adventure you’ll get sucked into and truly immersed. The game is atmospheric, beautiful, and serene with nature references all over. You need to try out Tala to understand what I mean. You haven’t played a game like this before.
The game is available for free as a playable demo using the link below.
If you like it, you can back it on Kickstarter. Give Tala a try.
- Gorgeous artwork
- Old-school animation
- Explore a living world that’ll deliver an atmospheric experience with total immersion
- Nice OST
- Awesome point-and-click adventure with interesting puzzles
- Interact with all the townsfolk
- No dialog, no reading
- Without any reading, will the game be able to devlier a powerful storyline?
Download and Play Tala (Early Access)
Weird indie game specialist. Adventure, retro, and simulators are my fav. Xbox One and PC gamer on the side.