Tarasque

Tarasque: Slot Overview

There are billions of us bipedal hominids scurrying about the planet, going about our daily business, pursuing our own personal dreams, haunted by our own personal nightmares, treading water in a sea of diversity. One thing which might unite a lot of people on planet Earth, though, is a lack of awareness of what exactly a Tarasque is. Confession time, this reviewer had never heard of such a word, so a trip to Wikipedia was required to discover that a Tarasque is 'a creature from French mythology. According to the Golden Legend, the beast had a lion-like head, a body protected by turtle-like carapace(s), six feet with bear-like claws, a serpent's tail, and could expel a poisonous breath.' Now we're all on the same page, we can safely dive into Print Studio's online slot Tarasque.

Although, safely is a ponderous word to use in a volatile slot from Print Studios, but let's worry about that aspect of Tarasque later. For now, take a minute, no, go on, do, to absorb the visual wonder that is Tarasque. Rarely does such a high-def background image appear in an online slot. To the charming sounds of a charming Mediaeval tune, let your eyes wander over the sepia-filtered oil painting-like quality of the idyllic scene. Forget the disease, oppression, and brutality of the earlier age and imagine a world without tar-sealed roads, office cubicles, or pollution for a moment, a world where chivalry trumped swiping left or right, where magic still existed if only in people's heads, and you'll be in the right frame of mind for taking on Tarasque, an absolute feast of Mediaeval delights.

Spose, now we should look at some more down-to-earth stuff such as stats, facts, and figures. For starters, Tarasque is a cluster-paying grid slot, played on an 8x8 gaming matrix, where wins are created when at least 5 identical pay symbols are connected in horizontal and/or vertical directions. With its medium-high volatile math model, Tarasque has an RTP of 96.3% and a stake range of 10 c to $/€50 per spin.

Symbols in a winning cluster are removed from the grid by the cascading mechanic. The spaces are filled by symbols dropping down, and if a new win is created after the drop, the cascade feature fires again. The game is able to make clusters wins out of 8 different regular pay symbols. The first 4 are a clover, a snail shell, a lemon, and a horseshoe, while the remaining 4 are some rather interesting-looking character symbols from the era. Make a cluster of 5 matching symbols to win 0.2 to 2 times the bet, going all the way up to 100 to 1,000 times the bet for clusters of 64 identical symbols. A triangle with an eye inside it, like that Eye of Providence icon on the American $1 bill, is Tarasque's wild symbol. The wild substitutes for all paying symbols on the grid.

Tarasque: Slot Features

On the features side, Tarasque has cascades, Morphing Clusters, Celestial Blessings, Progressive Features, the Tarasque feature, and feature buys.

Morphing Clusters

The top right tower above the reel area is the Mage's tower, which displays a Morphing symbol. If a winning cluster matches the Morphing symbol, the cluster transforms into a different symbol adjacent to the cluster, growing in size, and the Morphing symbol changes to a new symbol. This process repeats until there are no more matches between a cluster and the Morphing symbol. The Morphing symbol also changes if it does not match the unleashed symbol during the Unleashed Stage.

Celestial Blessings

Cluster wins can be multiplied by characters, including an image of Michelangelo's Adam, floating over the grid, bestowing a multiplier of x2, x3, x4, x5, x10, or x20.

Progressive Features

Each win contributes to the progress bar, activating random modifiers when reaching certain collection points. When there are no more wins, the highlighted modifier of the current lowest level activates. The higher level a modifier is activated on, the more powerful it will be:

• Wild Spikes – a number of wilds are randomly added to the grid. The higher the level, the more wilds are added.
• Blazing Gaze – all low-pay symbols are removed from the screen. On higher levels, low-pay symbols are removed from following cascades.
• Mage's Morph – a number of Morphing symbols are placed at random on the grid. The higher the level, the more Morphing symbols are added.
• Bulking Beast – the Tarasque increases in size until there are no more wins. The higher the level, the bigger the size.

The Tarasque – Devour & Unleash Feast

When the first Progression modifier is activated, the Tarasque symbol, which is wild, is placed at random on the grid. The Tarasque devours the symbols from winning clusters it is part of. When there are no more Progressive modifiers to be activated, the Tarasque unleashes all devoured symbols (they are placed back on the grid), starting with the lowest value symbol. When there are no more wins, the next collected symbol is unleashed. Up to a full screen of symbols can be unleashed at a time. The progress bar is inactive during this phase.

Feature Bet

From the Feature Bet, players can guarantee 6, 12, 23, 34, or 45 Morphing symbols on the initial grid for 3.5x (RTP 96.46%), 12x (RTP 96.58%), 46x (RTP 96.69%), 105x (RTP 96.89%), or 221.7x the bet (RTP 96.46%), respectively.

Tarasque: Slot Verdict

The more you think about it, the more phenomenally mind-bending it gets. On the one hand, you've got casino game makers that get together to dream up a new game and end up settling on a bog-standard generic letdown or, say, a 'book' slot, which does the same thing as 15 thousand other 'book' slots. Then you've got studios, and there aren't many, like Print, which literally bandies about ideas that are rarely hinted at in brainstorming sessions, that break down the walls between online casino games and highbrow art. At least, this was the impression Tarasque gave off. The visuals are exquisite (a little bit Peter & Sons), bringing together oil painting elements with a humorous touch, and it was hard not to think of the taunting French guard scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail while playing Tarasque. There were echoes, to a degree, of Cash Defense and Holy Hand Grenade, but they felt like warm-up sketches compared to the level of detail Print Studios has squeezed into Tarasque.

Fortunately, gamblers aren't just here for art appreciation hour. Tarasque is just as, if not more, entertaining in the gaming department, as well. On paper, Tarasque's core gameplay might seem like standard grid slot stuff – hit clusters, collect winning symbols, and trigger features from a progress bar. Fair dues, but within this, Tarasque has a bunch of innovations to offer. These include the Morphing symbol dynamic and the growing regurgitating Tarasque symbol - when you've got 64 high-pay symbols collected, and you're sitting back waiting patiently for them to be unleashed, well, it's just really nice. Reasons enough on their own to give Tarasque a spin, but when factoring in the wholly unique way Tarasque presents its action, capped with a 20,000x the bet max and fabulous characters, the game is darn near unmissable for players into this form of gaming.

Cluster paying grid slots that trigger features when the right amount of winning symbols have been collected are nothing new. Play'n GO, for one, mastered this technique in games like Reactoonz a long time back - a game that, with its collection meter and modifiers, still stands as a model for most grid slots. However, the impressive attention to detail, the monumental levels of creativity coupled with Print Studio's wit and daring, not to mention the skill needed to implement it all, make Tarasque a completely singular experience.