Chicory is a Zelda-like game in a world that loses its colours and where the gameplay turns around the recoloration of the world. this basis gives power like swimming in the colours like in Splatoon.
It is an adventure game but there are very few battle encounters. You will spend most of your time exploring, resolving puzzles, painting and reading dialogs. The bosses are the only battles you will have. They are very easy, but the animations are mind-blowing and the music of those bosses are extremely good. By the way, the composer of the game is Lena Raine, and Emi Evans makes an appearance for a song! They are the composer of Celeste and the singer of Nier.

Chicory is a relaxing and very accessible game. I recommend it for his originality, his music and the themes it addresses.
Of course, they are themes centralized around the art world. It poses questions on the loose of author vision during restoration work. It also approaches the difficulty to find a place in this field and having its creations recognized. And a lot more!
But it also deals with very personal subjects. Demotivation, depression, lack of self-confidence, lack of recognition, impostor syndrome, ... I think they are themes that speak to everyone and it make the interactions very touching. Specially between Chicory and the main character.

By viewing the cuteness of the game, I didn’t expect to find a game with such care on the themes it addresses. But it became an aspect that I loved. Also, I was a bit afraid to not like it because I’m really bad with drawing stuff, but finally it was not a problem.

Clearly it's a game that you have to play for the gameplay, which is simple but has a lot of subtilities that make it interesting enough to have fun over the 20 hours the game offers. But the structure can be tiresome (you do the same thing during the whole game). This is not my case as I found that it put enough break between two tactical sections, but you have to like the small management section for that too. And if you want to play it just for the soul cannon mechanic, I never used it. The game gets easier and easier after the halfway point and I even find the bosses easier than the elite encounters. Since you can only use this mechanic on bosses, and they're not particularly difficult, you're not pushed to do so (it's still a cool mechanic, but it seems like they didn't want to frustrate players and made the game too easy to avoid forcing you to use it). And there is another option that makes the game too easy too, it's the possibility to go back to the last checkpoint. There's no limit to that, and I think it would have been nice to limit the number of uses per save, especially on the bosses where you're not really punished when you use it.

But other than that, the gameplay is really nice. The characters form duos in the guns and these duos become more and more powerful as you keep using them. Each character also brings a passive to his colleague, so you get some nice combos. Every enemy is weak in one kind of attack, so the game pushes you to vary your duos, which is a good thing. On the map, you have to be careful with your life and mana resources, you have to plan how much you can use in battle so that it's fast enough and still have enough mana for the next fight. This is important because if you are too slow you gain much less xp, so the game becomes harder if you play badly. You can also take risks by going on more difficult roads and fighting elites that give you more xp and resources to upgrade your tank, but you always have to watch your mana stock. This resource management is one of the things I liked the most, always plan several fights in advance rather than limiting yourself or throwing everything into one fight. You have to find a good balance and I would say that this is perhaps the most 'complex' part of the game. Especially since you have some strong skills that require a lot of mana, particularly in the first chapters.

I said it was a game that you had to play for its gameplay, and that's because the story is not really exciting. It's easy to follow, and the narrator does a great job for that, but it's pure shonen. The characters lack of development too, but they have quite marked personalities while being cute which makes them engaging. On the other hand, the music is good, especially the ones with a choir, but the loop is messed up on some of them which is a shame.