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dkirschner's Chicory: A Colorful Tale (PC)

[July 8, 2023 02:39:21 PM]

Completed last night. This is a charming game reminiscent of old-school RPGs like Earthbound, but without traditional core RPG systems like leveling up or combat (they are there, but simpler). The draw (ha-ha) here is that you get to be creative and artistic and paint things. Points for creativity for sure. You play as the new "wielder," a person (or animal...it's a world full of anthropomorphic animals) who brings color to the world with a magical paint brush. The old wielder (the titular Chicory) is depressed (mental health is a theme), and you've always wanted to be the wielder. Except...the wielder's artistic talent is only as good as the player's, which was a consistent source of humor. Nevertheless, everyone thinks that whatever you paint is magnificent, life-changing, deep (even if you paint WTF on a t-shirt that characters then wear around; create terrible portraits; or even paint nothing at all!).

All is not well in anthropomorphic painting land. The color is gone from the world. Oh no! A bad time to become the wielder. Off you go then to fight back the corruption and restore color to the world. On your journey, you'll meet many cute characters, find lots of cosmetics to equip, pick up a lot of litter, solve a lot of puzzles, and generally enjoy getting to draw and color things. Honestly, my favorite part of this game was going into a dark cave and filling the whole thing in with color. I LOVED when I got to go into caves. Filling the screens with color was so satisfying. I imagine that most players have something like this that they really enjoyed, whether it was painting portraits, coloring houses, painting characters, or whatever.

The game's length started to feel inflated by about halfway through because there are a lot of "presents" to find, which have the cosmetic items in them. I eventually started ignoring anything optional--presents, litter, decorating, side quests--because they don't make your character "better" in any way. There are no stat upgrades. I was playing instrumentally, so the extra artistic and playful stuff, I more or less skipped. There is a lot of dialogue as well; every character will tell you like 10 things. And the longer dialogues between you and main characters like Chicory in story parts can feel like they go on and on. One thing I found interesting is that because the dialogue appears quickly on the screen, I read it quickly. This is in contrast to Pentiment, which I am also playing, where the dialogue slowly appears on the screen, and thus I read it slowly. I wonder how much of my reading speed can be explained by the text speed...this would be an interesting little experiment. Certainly the depth and complexity of the dialogue is different between the two games, and Chicory features gameplay that isn't just reading text (whereas Pentiment is almost all reading text). Anyway, it started to drag toward the end when you have to complete four "wielder trials," and I was glad when it was over.

This was a cute game with a lot of charm. I wouldn't say it's like a "must play," but perhaps more so if you want to see the painting mechanics, which are pretty cool, or are interested in taking your time and playing with the art tools that it provides. If you want an old-school RPG or a Zelda game, and don't care about painting stuff, then you can find something you'll probably like better.