TacTac Prologue Review

TacTac Prologue Review

4. I'm not Sure, About Games, Adventure, Genre, Indie, Point & click, Puzzle, Rating, Review, Steam review Leave a comment

Game: TacTac Prologue
Genre: Puzzle, Point-and-Click
System: Steam (Windows & macOS) (also available for Nintendo Switch & Apple Store)
Developer|Publisher: Goca Games
Age Rating: US E | UK 3+
Price: UK £2.49 | EU € 2,99 | USD $2.99
Release Date: May 2nd, 2023

Review code used, with many thanks to Goca Games.

TacTac Prologue is a puzzle game with a point-and-click adventure feel. Players need to head around their town to say goodbye to friends before they move away, and those friends are pretty well hidden.

A weird person is hiding in a bush in the middle of a park. They are happy and comfortable there. The person, named Tuuna, says "I's so comfortable here."
You do you, buddy.

How TacTac Prologue Plays

Like many point-and-click adventure-type puzzle games, players need to use the mouse to click around the screen to move and interact with items. Items that can be interacted with glow with a yellow outline when players use their magnifying glass. Some items trigger puzzles that help players get closer to where their friends are hiding around town.

Shows a cartoon map of the town, complete with roads, homes, and a traveling circus that is in town.
The town is fairly large, giving players a lot of ground to cover between puzzles.

The clicking, which is the players’ main interaction with the game, is awkward. You have to be close to objects to pick them up, which makes sense, but you must also be standing in a specific spot to pick things up. There are a handful of puzzle pieces, which were this game’s clue tokens, located in the bedroom and on the street that I couldn’t pick up no matter where I stood or how many times I clicked.

Depicts the main character standing over a puzzle piece near a street lamp.
I could not pick up this puzzle piece no matter where I stood or how much I clicked on it. This happened several times while playing.

Directional movement clicking doesn’t allow the character to move around objects, so players have to click around the object to come around the other side of it to interact. Hit boxes on many of the interactables are precise in a way that made playing kind of infuriating.

It didn’t help that there was much to click on; the puzzles were few and far between, even more so than a Professor Layton title. There is so much world, so much to interact with, but the density of puzzles is pretty low. That wasn’t too much of a downside for me personally since I like exploring and clicking around. I just wish the clicking around and exploring were a little more fluid and graceful.

And then, there were the puzzles.

The Puzzles in TacTac

There seemed to be two types of puzzles in TacTac Prologue: interesting, well-thought-out puzzles like the one below:

One of the Puzzles from TacTac; it is a series of streets with directions on it. Only one of the four starting points can follow all the instructions and end up in a place.
Here’s one of the more interesting puzzles.

It was challenging in an interesting, non-math Professor Layton puzzle kind of way. I had to think about movement and follow instructions to get to the answer, then move the green circle over the starting place. The other type of puzzle was like the one below:

One of the puzzles from TacTac. This puzzle says "Daniel keeps a very well kept secret. Will it be in a box, a cupboard, or a trunk? Could it be in the chest or written in a letter? Move the green circle to indicate where the secret is kept." There is a popup with a hint for the puzzle, and it says "Daniel. Keeps. Secrets." The puzzle picture is of Daniel in his room, surrounding by things that he could keep secrets in, like a locked box, notes, books, under the rug, and more.
What?

The clue was less than helpful, the puzzle was more of a terrible riddle than a puzzle, and I stared at it for so long that I gave up on this game for a couple of days. When I figured it out (no spoilers), instead of thinking, “Oh that was clever and fun,” I thought, “Wow, that was a terrible solution.”

This shows a messy room with a boy main character saying "My room is very messy. I should pick it up before I go."
Spoiler Alert, you don’t really end up cleaning anything up.

I don’t mind difficult or weird puzzles, but I need a better hint system than that. Some puzzles I just won’t ever get, and I need a way to figure out the answers if I can’t puzzle through them myself. Good hint systems are really a requirement for modern puzzle games, and TacTac Prologue‘s wasn’t great.

The Look of TacTac Prologue

I kind of dig the scrappy, hand-drawn look of TacTac Prologue. It’s a little weird, a little colouring-book-looking. I wasn’t put off by the amateurish nature of the style. However, there were some issues with the colours. Everything in TacTac Prologue is hyper-saturated, making some of the loading and puzzle screens absolutely painful to look at. I won’t post any screenshots of it, but there is a transition screen between the world and puzzles that fills the screen with jigsaw pieces; the colours are nauseatingly bright. I can’t believe no one mentioned this during testing.

Depicts the main character's bedroom, and all the items that can be clicked on are lit up in yellow as the player uses his magnifying glass to see them.
You can use a magnifying glass to see all the things you can interact with, but you can’t interact with all of them.

It’s scrappy; it’s silly; it’s cute. The characters are highly stylized and weird looking. It’s all wonderful in the land of TacTac Prologue, minus the too-bright colours. I spent much time looking away from the screen while certain things loaded. I actually ended up fiddling with the colour balance of my screen just to make it bearable to look at. This may just be my thing, but when I asked my husband his opinion, he replied, “Goodness, that is loud.”

Shows players picking up a note and putting it into their inventory. It says "NOTE: The list of People Dunai needs to say goodbye to before starting his new life in the city."
Dunai is the main character, and he’s getting ready to leave. Players must interact with the town to find everyone on the list and say goodbye.
One one of the street corners in TacTac, players can see a clown. There is a house on the corner with a dog in the window. You can also see the street where a car is driving by.
So you can interact with all the cats in the window but not the dog in the window? What’s up with that?

Conclusion

I’m a big fan of point-and-click puzzle adventures. I’ve played many of them and love these Professor Layton-style games. However, TacTac Prologue left something to be desired. This is a real shame because like half of the game was super fun.

The other half, though, was either irritating, silly, blinding, or just not fun for me. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game, so I’m honestly not sure how to rate TacTac Prologue. I want to love it, but I’m not sure I can love it.

Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure. 
I'm not sure

 
           

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