The Touryst (Xbox Series X/S) Review

The Touryst, at its core is a simple and barebones puzzle-adventure game that will make people associate it with Minecraft due to its block-cube visual style. Peel back the layers though and what Shin'en Multimedia have developed here is a charming and varied puzzler with more style and substance than meets the eye. The main character, defined by his moustache, quiffed hair, red shirt and sunglasses is capable enough to platform, sprint and swim around the idyllic locations found across the game. The Touryst starts the adventure on the aptly named, Touryst Island, with very little instruction on what to do. The player will quite quickly figure out the puzzle they need to achieve as the island itself is pretty miniscule, to the point where not much else could be done. However, the journey begins upon completing this first task as the quest to find 4 Monument Core's begins. Progressing opens up more side quests and new missions crop up, which allow the player to have some free reign on which objectives to tackle and in any order they'd like.

The aforementioned islands are quite small in size, which does help focus the traversal on what needs to be done, although there isn't much wiggle room for exploration. Most islands can be full explored within a mere matter of minutes and it is often a few backtracking puzzles that extends the life of coming back to them. The islands are themed and similarly named on real-world idyllic locations such as Santorini, Ibiza, Hawaii and Fiji. The islands and their subsequent monuments have platforming sections which make it necessary to complete puzzles, so well-timed double jumps and sprints over pits are going to need to be practised if tasks are going to be completed. Puzzles can vary from simple fetch quests to activating posts, none of which should throw off any newcomer or veteran gamer.

One of the cooler elements of The Touryst is the mini-arcade featured on 'Leysure Island', which packs three mini demakes of Shin'en Multimedia's games including an arcade racer, FAST (referencing FAST RMX), Jett Rocket Dyamite (referencing Jett Rocket) and Nano Break (a Breakout clone). In most video games these would often serve as a palate cleanser, and they are definitely a lot of fun, especially for high score chasers, but each mission in The Touryst is so varied in style that even without them it would still stand tall.

Visually The Touryst looks stunning and colourful, right down to being pixel perfect. The 4K resolution at 120fps is welcome, albeit not overly necessary either, but it is definitely taking full advantage of the hardware capabilities. This also includes none existent load times and the ability to use the Quick Resume feature from launch. The sound effects a reminiscent of early gaming chip-sets with bleeps, bloops and other quirky noises that bring back the 80s nostalgia. Similarly, the synthwave background music in certain environments can definitely help cement this feeling, although the majority of the game is actually played to no soundtrack at all, leaving some environments feeling a little less atmospheric and sparser.