I think my opinion of this game is a tiny bit inflated because I adore the media it is aping. Friends of mine who've played this but have never seen Twin Peaks found the tone too weird. But when you get the references a lot of the bizarre choices read more as jokes than clumsy writing. Alan's monologuing genuinely had me chuckling. A pitch-perfect self-obsessed writer who's been sniffing his own farts for too long.

Gameplay is admittedly a little annoying if you're not great at shooting and have bad eyes. I could have gotten away bumping up the brightness on my TV. Still, the ambience was at times legitimately scary, despite monsters essentially being dudes in flannel.

I can't wait to be able to play the sequel. Alan Wake was prescient in it's references to prestige TV, given the thru-lines in Twin Peaks The Return. Can't wait to see Remedy take it a step farther!

Calico's been in my itch.io library for a while. I generally like to play games like this on my laptop and I was immediately confronted with a truly bonkers control scheme. Saying a game is made for controller doesn't mean you can just screw over people using other control schemes! The most glaring of these issues is the camera. I found myself frequently looking at the walls of a building I wasn't even inside while passing by. Cameras are a deceptively difficult to make, so some jank is expected with an indie game, but I would consider this untenable.

I hesitate to be too harsh as it's clear this was made by a tiny team. The animal animations are very cute, character designs very distinct. But when it's hard to control and navigate, It's difficult to want to dive in. I hope this team gives it another go in the future!

After logging too many hours, like I often do with farm sims, I think the overall design is a little unbalanced. There was simply too much to do in the starting farm and too little in the "bonus" farms. Since there's less to discover, there wasn't much keeping me exploring those areas. I spent more time trying to get to there than actually enjoying the new locations. As a result, though adorably rendered, the subsequent areas feel more like an afterthought.

There are a lot of things I liked about the game, though. The sprite work was impressive. I am a sucker for a use-based leveling system. I liked the magic/mana system in lieu of a stamina system.

Worth a play if you like Stardew type games. Despite my quibbles, I logged dozens of hours into this thing.

I got so close to finishing this game, but since I had been playing it on and off for like 5 years, I couldn't bare to finish the bonus dungeon. I didn't really care about the new girl character, and she's such a huge part of that extra dungeon. There were some quality of life improvements that made this the superior version, but there is no world in which the $60 price tag was appropriate for this game!

Regardless, the combat is smooth, the UI is yummy, the characters are cute. Mostly it's just to damn long.

Overall extremely mid. I didn't have many glitches like some on Switch, but I did blaze through it and I probably won't go back.

I hesitate to criticize the writing because this game was made by an Indonesian team, so it might very well be a translation issue. Regardless, the pacing of the text boxes was excruciatingly slow. It might have been to allow the animations to execute? I ended up speeding through them without reading because the lines being delivered were pretty milquetoast.

I did like the method of "leveling up" character relationships with events you can decide when to initiate. I also enjoyed the potion making puzzles, it's always fun to see how different games approach the issue of potion brewing! The pixel art was also gorgeous!