I'm convinced that the original name of this game was to be Tashi and Tom, but at the last minute, someone on the development team said "hey, you know what would be a fun idea? If we replaced the latter of this perfectly alliterative pair of names with 'Hom.'" and then someone else said "yeah, and how bout we add a subtitle that's also an alliteration, just to throw them off even more?" Well, regardless...
Tashi and To-DAMMIT!
Tashi and Hom is a third-person 3D beat-em-up kind of similar to Nightmare but without the "boo! Ees scawy!" aesthetic. You control two characters (whose names should be obvious); Tashi takes damage and follows your movement commands, while Hom attacks enemies. Each level consists of about 10 rooms of gradually increasing difficulty (and by that I mean increasing enemy count) before you get to a boss battle.
With a game like this, I think it would be most helpful to explain my experience level-by-level. The first temple, the Bull Temple, was relatively straightforward. My only real complaint was that the all of the controls were explained to me textually, while all I really needed was like a signpost with the "X" button on it in the background or something. Anyway, the level was well designed both mechanically and aesthetically. Color me impressed. Let's see the next temple.
The Bird Temple was rather unextraordinary. The only innovations were annoying bird enemies that kamikaze into you like the Guay from Ocarina of Time but substantially more infuriating, and the new boss, who just literally rolled around the room spitting out its babies, unlike the first level boss, who had an interesting and difficult pattern that required you to think first and then act. The Bull boss killed me like 5 or 6 times before I managed to conquer it, but I got the Bird boss on my first try. It was here that I sensed the game was starting to lose some steam.
The Fox Temple confirmed that. Now there are fox enemies (not as annoying as the birds, mind you) who rummage around in the ground for a bit before popping their little heads out like the most clubbable whack-a-mole. The most tense part of this level, and arguably the whole game, was the room right before the boss, but that was just an empty room with like a million enemies and some haphazardly placed spikes. It required no thought and it felt like wasted potential. After all, other rooms were designed so that you could use the enemies' properties against them, like the narrow hallways that you can lead a conga line of bulls through to pick them off one by one. That's rewarding! Just kind of mashing attack while dashing through a room full of squishy baddies is...not so much. The boss of this temple also smelled of fatigued developers. It was just 2 bigger fox enemies who followed literally the same pattern as the little fox enemies, only these guys whip their tails around. The pattern takes 2 seconds to learn, and after that, it's just a matter of not getting hit too much. After I beat it, the game just kinda stopped. There was no exit for me to go through...nothing. I wandered around a barren level for a while before killing myself on some spikes out of boredom.
Now, you guys know that this blog is more of a "first impressions" thing than a collection of actual reviews, so I gotta ask. Is this the norm for ending DigiPen games? Because if so, I'm glad I don't finish most of them...
Here's an analogy for ya: imagine you're taking a history test on, I don't know, the Alamo or something. All the teacher needs is for you to tell him (or her, lest I be called a misogynist) that Jim Bowie once got into a nasty tussle with some other dudes at a sandbar, but you and your overachieving brain want to give him the exact date as well, so you write down "October of 1831," only to have your teacher cross it out and write "September of 1827," and mark you off two points. If only you had just restrained yourself and only given the base materials, you wouldn't have lost those points. Well, that's Tashi and Hom in a nutshell. They tried to do too much with too little and the final project suffered because of it. It's not a bad game. It's designed superbly and has enough variety (especially with the powerups) to keep gameplay interesting for the most part. I just wish they had focused on making a short but amazing experience, rather than a moderately long, decent one.
Wow, that was a long one, eh? If only every game gave me this much to talk about. That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay spiritual.
Links
Mashy and Prom: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25901
