The backstory to Chicory involves the powers of a magical brush, wielded by a chosen one and handed down with great reverence and ceremony. Music is also good, with boos fight tunes in particular hitting the right notes. Writing is similarly pitched with some veiled real-world references but nothing that would make it inappropriate for younger players. The characters themselves are all anthropomorphised animals in casual wear, giving the world a hipster feel that manages to remain the right side of charming. This has no real bearing on the game itself but it is surprising how much your initial reaction to a cartoon character can be affected by whether you like or loathe the food after which they are named. The culinary nomenclature isn’t restricted to your player character, however, as every character is named after some kind of foodstuff. It turns out that this becomes your character name, so in my case brave Rumballs set out to put things right. Much like the under-appreciated De Blob games, this provides the stage for a fun and thoughtful interrogation of what colour adds to our lives and why it might sometimes feel as if everything is washed away.Ĭhicory starts things off by getting you to enter your favourite food. The black and white isn’t just for effect, either, as it soon becomes clear that the world of Chicory has been washed of all colour by mysterious forces. Simple yet charming cartoon visuals in striking monochrome are married to an almost flip book approach to animation that reminded me of the cartoons I watched growing up in the UK in the 1980s (Roobarb and Henry’s Cat particularly). Sadly, the game doesn’t give you a large color palette, usually giving you four colors per region, severely limiting what you can do in each map.Chicory immediately grabs your attention with its distinctive aesthetic. Each new tile I’d visit felt like a page of a coloring book, waiting for me to fill it up with my own creativity. I thought that having to deal with a completely black-and-white world at first would be annoying, but that ended up being the complete opposite. Thankfully, these moments are also the ones which feature the game’s best background tunes. From out of nowhere, you’ll stop coloring a rat’s house to cheer it up, to fighting some macabre bosses which move around the arena like a motorcycle with a nitrous boost. You just don’t have the same drawing and painting precision with an analog stick (or the ultra-sensitive touchpad) as you would get with a mouse.ĭespite being the single friendliest game I’ve played in 2021 as a whole (yes, even more than DC Super Hero Girls), Chicory: A Colorful Tale features some tough puzzle solving, dungeon exploration, and a handful of boss battles that are way more difficult and tense than the rest of the game. It certainly works and it’s more comfortable that you would imagine, but it was clearly meant to be played on a PC. The game does one hell of job trying to emulate the feeling of playing a proper mouse and keyboard game with a controller, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the developers for ALMOST achieving that.
CHICORY A COLORFUL TALE GAMEPLAY FREE
While moving with the left stick, you have free control of your magical paintbrush with either the right stick or the DualSense’s touchpad. The control scheme is easily Chicory‘s highlight. Granted, in a much simplified and borderline dangerless manner, but the point stands. It took reaching a pivotal moment at the end of the first level for me to finally appreciate the game for what it actually is: a feel-good hit that mixes elements from Animal Crossing, Undertale, and, believe it or not, The Legend of Zelda. It was cute as heck, but its gameplay was quite boring. I won’t lie, at first I just wasn’t “getting” Chicory. The world has suddenly lost all of its color and it’s up to you to solve this problem.
CHICORY A COLORFUL TALE GAMEPLAY HOW TO
The first chapter mostly revolves around meeting the people living in a nearby town, learning how to handle the game’s unique control scheme, and solving some of their color-related issues. The game itself starts off pretty slowly. However, as time goes on the story becomes a lot more engrossing, with layers upon layers of subplots, character development, emotions, and the occasional dumb joke, because we’re only human after all. At first, you’re actually just a kid pretending to be a hero, not even being recognized as a wielder by your peers or local populace.
He takes the mantle of the world’s “wielder”, an artist responsible for filling the world with color, after the previous person in charge, a bunny called Chicory, decided not to go on with her job. If have enough time, skill, and patience, you can turn what was once a black-and-white map into a colorful setting.Ĭhicory: A Colorful Tale is a story starring a janitor named after your favorite food (nice Earthbound reference, by the way).
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