The Touryst
Switch
Developer/publisher Shin’en Multimedia
Format Switch
Release Out now
We will never be convinced that the Fast Racing series is anything more than a pound-shop F-Zero, embraced by an audience too easily dazzled by visual flash to notice they’re driving an vastly inferior model. Still, credit to the former demosceners at Shin’en Multimedia for wringing every watt of horsepower from Nintendo hardware. Combining retro-style voxel art with modern lighting and weather effects, The Touryst isn’t far off how you’d imagine a 3D
Octopath Traveler might look. But the more immediate comparison is the toy-town aesthetic of Link’s Awakening – albeit with a more effective use of shallow focus and no distracting framerate drops. In visual terms at least, Shin’en has outdone Nintendo itself.
Technical brilliance tends to be where the praise begins and ends for the German studio. But The Touryst
is comfortably its best new game since 2010 puzzler Art Of Balance. It is, in essence, an activity holiday on a picturesque archipelago. Sure, there’s a story of sorts, involving ancient monuments, a spot of artefact collecting and some gentle, fairly conventional dungeoneering. Yet just as often you’ll find yourself sidetracked by a wide variety of entertaining asides across the game’s eight islands. You surf, dive for treasure and race drones. You go spelunking for diamonds and engage in a spot of photography. You even visit a local arcade and try to beat a boastful fellow’s high scores in old-school versions of past Shin’en games; the Fast Racing demake, we’re pleased to report, is the shortest and easiest of the lot.
Playful and peaceful, its Aegean- to Fijian-inspired islets are a pleasure to exist in, each hiding enough secrets that you’ll want to explore them from shore to voxelated shore. The fun doesn’t end when it’s time to take a break from sunning yourself, or from dancing among the revellers at a sunset beach party. Though the puzzles are mostly nuts-and-bolts fare, the decision to forgo combat has forced Shin’en to concoct some unusual end-of-dungeon encounters, only one of which becomes too fiddly for its own good. Your blood pressure may spike again during one poor platforming sequence which asks you to leap across a series of spherical platforms suspended in darkness, their position in 3D space almost impossible to determine without careful adjustment of the camera between jumps.
An endgame sting hints at a follow up, though it’s more shameless sequel bait than a satisfying wrap-up in its own right. But in the middle of winter this easygoing adventure otherwise makes for an entertaining getaway. No Shin’en game plays as good as it looks; this one, however, comes closer than most.