Toroa: Skycall

Toroa: Skycall casts the player as a toroa, an albatross, blown off its migratory course and forced to find a new way home across the South Pacific. Atawhai Interactive builds the whole experience around gliding: banking through wind currents, diving to skim the ocean surface, and threading rings of cloud that mark the route forward. There is no combat, no failure state in any meaningful sense, and almost no friction between the player and the next scripted beat. The pitch is closer to Journey or ABZU than to any conventional flight sim, and the game leans hard into that lineage rather than trying to hide it.

A short, gorgeously drawn flight through te ao Māori

What immediately sets Toroa: Skycall apart from its clearest influences is how explicitly it is built around te ao Māori, the Māori world. The main menu and a large portion of the dialogue run in te reo Māori with English subtitles underneath, the soundtrack draws on taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments), and the cast of sea creatures Toroa meets along the way -- dolphins, whales, penguins, a flock of seagulls that gradually joins its wake -- are written with specific cultural texture rather than generic wildlife-cameo dialogue. Several Steam reviews written in te reo Māori itself, alongside English ones from players who identify as Māori or as second-language speakers, single this out as the thing the game does that almost nothing else on Steam attempts, and treat the studio's evident care with the material as reason enough to recommend it on its own.

Gorgeous, but a short and narrow flight path

The flying itself earns near-universal praise in the review pool: multiple players describe the glide-and-boost feel as "smooth like butter," and the sense of speed when skimming the water or threading a canyon is repeatedly called out as the game's best moment-to-moment feeling. The environments shift from open ocean to lush islands to dream-like cloudscapes, and the visual variety within any given stretch is real, even if the palette stays soft and painterly throughout.

Where the reception splits is on how much game actually sits underneath that flying. Total playtime reported by reviewers clusters tightly in the one-to-three-hour range, and more than one player frames the whole experience as "short and sweet" rather than as something with legs. Two of the more detailed negative reviews make a sharper version of the same complaint: one player, arriving with a "Little Kitty, Big City but with an albatross" expectation, reports that after an hour they had only encountered three recurring textures (sky, clouds, water) and that the level design felt more like a cloud-textured corridor than an explorable space, arguing the game's "Story Rich" Steam tag oversells what is mostly a guided glide from checkpoint to checkpoint. Another reviewer, while sympathetic to the game's cultural goals, says bluntly that "it's hard to feel involved, the game almost plays itself" and that the visuals become repetitive well before the credits roll. A third player wishes the invisible guardrails that keep Toroa on-course were pushed further out, so the landscapes could actually be explored rather than just admired in passing.

Progression that funnels rather than branches

Steam's global achievement data backs up the corridor complaint in a useful, concrete way. The first of the game's ten achievements has already been earned by 92.6% of players who have unlocked anything, dropping to 68.4% by the second and down to roughly 20-25% for the final handful. That is the signature of a tightly linear story with one path through it: almost everyone who starts sees the opening stretch, but a large share drift away, or simply finish and never return, well before the final act. For a game built around companionship (the flock of seagulls, the recurring dolphin and whale check-ins) and a slow build toward reuniting Toroa with its family, that drop-off suggests the middle section is where interest wanes, matching the "starts to feel the same" complaints in the written reviews.

A few players also report a specific reload bug: getting stuck in the water after a checkpoint reload in the game's bay area, and again after exiting a tunnel late in the story, where reloading to escape the stuck state skipped a scripted flight sequence entirely. None of the reviews describe this as game-breaking, and it doesn't appear to have blocked anyone from finishing, but it's a rough edge worth flagging for a title that otherwise polishes its presentation carefully.

A soundtrack and cast worth the price of admission

The music draws consistent, specific praise across almost every review in the sample -- several single out the taonga pūoro instrumentation by name, and one reviewer describes the game's closing stretch as pairing "psychedelic interludes" with a genuinely upbeat soundtrack shift that catches players off guard after two hours of ambient calm. The character writing for the animal cast, described variously as "silly," "mystical," and "cute," gets similar credit, with the game's baby albatross character singled out by name in multiple reviews as an unexpected highlight. Price-to-length is the recurring value question: at $12.99 for what most players clock at two to three hours, several reviewers explicitly frame their recommendation as "worth it to support the developers" rather than "worth it purely as entertainment," and at least one reviewer who picked it up in a bundle discount rated it more modestly, around 6.5 or 7 out of 10, once removed from that framing.

Final verdict

Toroa: Skycall is a small, carefully made game that is much more interested in showing players something specific and heartfelt than in giving them a long or mechanically deep flight sim. The gliding feels good in the moment, the audiovisual craft is consistently strong, and the cultural specificity of its writing and music is the rare thing on Steam that genuinely can't be found anywhere else in the genre. But the achievement data and the more detailed critical reviews agree on the same shape of problem: a single linear corridor dressed up as exploration, a runtime that most players clear in an afternoon, and a middle stretch that repeats its few tricks past the point of novelty. Recommended for players drawn in by the setting and willing to treat a short, pretty, occasionally repetitive glide as its own reward, less so for anyone expecting the open, exploratory flight game its early trailers seem to promise.