I never want to play this again.
Touryst is an interesting game to be “enhanced” for the Xbox Series line since you don’t really expect that a game with such a minimalist approach to graphics would need 4k resolution. That being said, Touryst is a shockingly good looking game with a few visual problems here and there. I was originally going to make this a simple “It Came From Game Pass” article but since I completed all of the achievements in the meantime this one is for the 100% Club.
The Touryst is a simple puzzle game developed by Shin’en Multimedia that received an enhanced experience for the Xbox Series consoles. You play as the unnamed mustache-bearing tourist who travels around a series of islands helping people complete tasks and just generally enjoying himself on vacation. Some of the tasks are short and obvious, like picking up coconuts and bringing them to an ice cream vendor so he can make something tasty. Others are long, arduous, and rather obscure like helping a gallery curator by photographing things based on his vague desires.
Along the way you’ll take on dungeon-esque monuments each laden with their own style of puzzles to solve. You can’t die in these dungeons, the worst that will happen is you might get knocked out and transported to the start of the room. In fact overall failure is not an option nor is it a possibility. You might get set back a few paces in your adventure but there is no way to game over or lose in The Touryst. Everything about the game encourages you to lay back and enjoy the experience. Pretend you’re the one on vacation.
Well almost everything. One issue I have with some of the mini-games is that they were built in a way that there’s really only one way to complete them and the puzzle is figuring out that way. For instance there’s a surfboarding mini-game that feels similar to California Games that accompanies an achievement for completing a 540 degree spin. You need to complete that spin as it’s pretty much the only way to hit the 10,000 point threshold for the mini-game.
Another mini-game has you playing an arcade game based on Shin’en’s own Fast RMX which is essentially an F-Zero clone. You have to play the game a very specific way in order to beat the clock long enough to reach the high score.
The biggest fault I will give to The Touryst lies in the game’s visual accessibility and its camera. In the monument sections the game really likes to put you in low-light situations with bottomless pits that gamers with poor vision or depth perception will have a very hard time getting through. It doesn’t help in later monuments where you are trying to land on small glowing balls with a stilted camera and very poor visibility on where you are jumping and how far everything is.
Enjoy this:
The Touryst can be completed 100% over the course of an afternoon. Thankfully you don’t have to complete 100% of the tasks in order to see the ending, but you definitely do if you want to get the achievement. To be honest I threw the game down once I hit the minimum threshold because I was so frustrated by a couple of the mini-games, and then went back and just swept through everything.
Sometimes the best answer is to put the game down and come back to it after a few hours of letting your thoughts simmer. It’s a perfect Game Pass game because while I mostly enjoyed The Touryst it’s not a title I can see myself being eager to come back to in the future.
MMO Fallout 