I'm happy to report that the moment-to-moment act of painting feels nice. It's easy to do, as you can just tap discrete objects to instantly fill them with color, and you can hold a button down to automatically fill in large spaces. You don't have to worry too much about coloring inside the lines if you want to maintain a clean look with your work. If you make a mistake, you can do the exact same things with the erase button.
Each area gives you a different four-color palette, so you're likely to end up with something visually coherent and pleasing even if you don't have any formal knowledge of complementary color schemes.I'm not really a visual arts person, so I didn't get too much use out of the myriad brush customization options I got from doing sidequests. However, I still found it relaxing and satisfying to fully color in screens with the base painting mechanics.
There's cleverness to how these painting mechanics translate to actual progression. You have to consider things like what objects to paint, which specific spots to paint, and what to erase. Some light platforming sections also require a bit of timing with using your paintbrush. The puzzles have just the right amount of complexity that I only had to take a beat or two to parse environments and their interactable elements then suss out solutions for most of them. What platforming there is isn't mechanically demanding, and when I made mistakes, I found the level design to be pretty simple and forgiving that I could get back to where I was quickly.
I do wish the boss fights were as interesting as the puzzles. While they look cool, with some neat visual and mechanical wrinkles that vary things up, they don't make any use of your abilities. It's all just moving yourself to the right spot to not get hit and clicking on the boss. It can get hectic dodging the escalating attack patterns because you don't have much mobility, but that's the extent of these battles being engaging. There are only two that I remember posing any sort of challenge, one about halfway through and the other being the last boss. There's no hard failure state as well. The default difficulty setting lets you only take two hits, but you just have to restart a phase (i think?) and not the entire battle, so it all felt low-stakes to me.
I played on mouse and keyboard, so I can imagine the boss fights would be way harder with a controller and thus feel more involved.
The music does so much to elevate these battles. It's unsurprising because the amazing Lena Raine did the soundtrack. Her work on Celeste is maybe my favorite part of that game, and it might be the same for this game.
A good mix of electronic and acoustic sounds make up the score, fitting the different vibes of each area and story moment. There's the relaxing gentle strings in the Town of Luncheon, the dark head-bopping synthwave dance beats of Probably Ancient Evil, the beautiful melancholy piano of Simmer Springs, and the bouncy easy listening sax of Dinners, the Big City to highlight a handful. Together with a ton more memorable tracks, this OST helps bring to life a whimsical adventure that delves into some ~real ♥♥♥♥~.
Most of the whimsy comes from the optional activities and NPC conversations. The tone can be a tad twee, but there's enough personality and variety in the surprisingly big cast that I ultimately found doing sidequests and talking to npcs to be a warm respite to the more serious subject matter of the A plot.
The overarching narrative tackles themes of self-doubt, creative burnout, and the burdens of tradition. It does so with the right balance of authenticity and empathy, not being afraid of expressing the thoughts and emotions we all have when our self-esteem is at its lowest, while offering sincere affirmations of support. So even within the heroic fantasy wrappings, the two main characters have believable arcs. Granted, that heroic fantasy layer along with where I'm at in terms of personal growth and acceptance kept the story from deeply resonating with me.
The more intriguing point the game tries to make is selling the idea that everyone has a creative spark. I don't quite buy it from the in-fiction storytelling. It rejects the Chosen One trope through the explicit writing aspects, but you're still the only person in the world that gets anything done, and everybody praises you constantly, even if you half-ass tasks. It gestures at this concept at the very end, but by then the game is already over, so it's not actually developed.
Where it does succeed in this goal is, more importantly, through player interaction. There's no extrinsic reward to coloring everything on a screen, but I did so for about 80% of the map. There's no grading system for achieving an aesthetic, but I still took the time and effort to color spaces in a way that made sense to my untrained eyes. Sure, the looks I went for were basic as hell, but the fact that I ended up caring at all while having no aspirations to paint without the game straining to make that happen made me believe in its core argument: you don't have to be an ~artist~ to express creativity.
While I won't be proudly sharing screenshots or gifs of my "artistic" attempts at coloring in the world, I found calming contentment in bringing back color to the charming world of Chicory over the 13 and a half hours I spent with it.
Each area gives you a different four-color palette, so you're likely to end up with something visually coherent and pleasing even if you don't have any formal knowledge of complementary color schemes.I'm not really a visual arts person, so I didn't get too much use out of the myriad brush customization options I got from doing sidequests. However, I still found it relaxing and satisfying to fully color in screens with the base painting mechanics.
There's cleverness to how these painting mechanics translate to actual progression. You have to consider things like what objects to paint, which specific spots to paint, and what to erase. Some light platforming sections also require a bit of timing with using your paintbrush. The puzzles have just the right amount of complexity that I only had to take a beat or two to parse environments and their interactable elements then suss out solutions for most of them. What platforming there is isn't mechanically demanding, and when I made mistakes, I found the level design to be pretty simple and forgiving that I could get back to where I was quickly.
I do wish the boss fights were as interesting as the puzzles. While they look cool, with some neat visual and mechanical wrinkles that vary things up, they don't make any use of your abilities. It's all just moving yourself to the right spot to not get hit and clicking on the boss. It can get hectic dodging the escalating attack patterns because you don't have much mobility, but that's the extent of these battles being engaging. There are only two that I remember posing any sort of challenge, one about halfway through and the other being the last boss. There's no hard failure state as well. The default difficulty setting lets you only take two hits, but you just have to restart a phase (i think?) and not the entire battle, so it all felt low-stakes to me.
I played on mouse and keyboard, so I can imagine the boss fights would be way harder with a controller and thus feel more involved.
The music does so much to elevate these battles. It's unsurprising because the amazing Lena Raine did the soundtrack. Her work on Celeste is maybe my favorite part of that game, and it might be the same for this game.
A good mix of electronic and acoustic sounds make up the score, fitting the different vibes of each area and story moment. There's the relaxing gentle strings in the Town of Luncheon, the dark head-bopping synthwave dance beats of Probably Ancient Evil, the beautiful melancholy piano of Simmer Springs, and the bouncy easy listening sax of Dinners, the Big City to highlight a handful. Together with a ton more memorable tracks, this OST helps bring to life a whimsical adventure that delves into some ~real ♥♥♥♥~.
Most of the whimsy comes from the optional activities and NPC conversations. The tone can be a tad twee, but there's enough personality and variety in the surprisingly big cast that I ultimately found doing sidequests and talking to npcs to be a warm respite to the more serious subject matter of the A plot.
The overarching narrative tackles themes of self-doubt, creative burnout, and the burdens of tradition. It does so with the right balance of authenticity and empathy, not being afraid of expressing the thoughts and emotions we all have when our self-esteem is at its lowest, while offering sincere affirmations of support. So even within the heroic fantasy wrappings, the two main characters have believable arcs. Granted, that heroic fantasy layer along with where I'm at in terms of personal growth and acceptance kept the story from deeply resonating with me.
The more intriguing point the game tries to make is selling the idea that everyone has a creative spark. I don't quite buy it from the in-fiction storytelling. It rejects the Chosen One trope through the explicit writing aspects, but you're still the only person in the world that gets anything done, and everybody praises you constantly, even if you half-ass tasks. It gestures at this concept at the very end, but by then the game is already over, so it's not actually developed.
Where it does succeed in this goal is, more importantly, through player interaction. There's no extrinsic reward to coloring everything on a screen, but I did so for about 80% of the map. There's no grading system for achieving an aesthetic, but I still took the time and effort to color spaces in a way that made sense to my untrained eyes. Sure, the looks I went for were basic as hell, but the fact that I ended up caring at all while having no aspirations to paint without the game straining to make that happen made me believe in its core argument: you don't have to be an ~artist~ to express creativity.
While I won't be proudly sharing screenshots or gifs of my "artistic" attempts at coloring in the world, I found calming contentment in bringing back color to the charming world of Chicory over the 13 and a half hours I spent with it.