Jul 17

Jul 17 Review | Chicory: A Colorful Tale - Portrait of a Mind in 16:9

Chicory: A Colorful Tale released on the 10th of June 2021. That’s right, the day before E3. That means there are now two types of people; people who missed this gem among all the announcements, and people who scrounged up the time to beat it between conferences and have spent the last month shouting that everyone should make time for it.

Lobanov’s last game was also a Kickstarter game. Chicory raised roughly 4x times more than that game… People really enjoyed Wandersong.

Chicory comes from solo director, designer, programmer and writer Greg Lobanov, with assistance from a small supporting team of Lena Raine, Em Halberstadt, Alexis Dean-Jones and Madeline Berger, some of whom you may know from other indie games and projects. It’s also worth noting that Chicory was a Kickstarter project, which surpassed its relatively small goal (in game development, anyway) and raised a total of $84,327 by the end of its campaign. Indie developer (and evermore frequently publisher) Finji also helped bring the game to market.

The small team, the small budget, and the fact that most of this game was developed through a pandemic make Chicory an even more impressive triumph of a game than it already is. When put in simple terms Chicory is a very straightforward game: you explore a Legend of Zelda-esque overworld, solving puzzles, acquiring upgrades, partaking in short bullet hell boss fights little reminiscent of Undertale and talking to locals, all as a nebulous evil threatens to engulf the world in darkness. However that elevator pitch neglects to mention two very important details; firstly, you are for all intents and purposes the art director for much of the game and, secondly, Chicory might feature the most affable characters and sincere stories in video games.

Remember when kids morning shows would feature pictures where “they drew inside the lines so nicely”… Yeah I was never featured in one of those segment when I submitted stuff. — Remember when kids morning shows would feature pictures where *“they drew inside the lines so nicely”*… Yeah I was never featured in one of those segment when I submitted stuff.

First things first, the credits of the game do quite literally credit you as the art director. While Alexis Dean-Jones is the game’s character artist and animator, you are the person controlling what the world of Picnic looks like. After the opening events of the game, the world is stripped of colour, and everything is left white with harsh black outlines - but not for long. Your left stick (or WASD) controls your character, while the right stick, so often left unused in games like these, acts as a paintbrush (if you’re on PC your mouse cursor acts as, you know, a cursor paintbrush). Every few screens you traverse provide you with a new pallet of four colours to choose from and with these you paint the world. For the first few hours, I thought this was tedious, however, you quickly realise that something astonishing is going on. You’ll stop running from screen to screen, scrawling lines around the place as you go. Instead, every time you enter a new area, before you do anything, you’ll find yourself carefully painting in every pixel of this world. Whether it was the chill music, the subtle sound design for the rest of the world or locals you can have idle chats with, something just instantly hooked and had me slowing down from my usual frantic game-playing nature.

4K 60FPRS HIGH-LEVEL ESPORTS ELITE PAINTING RIGHT HERE!

The game certainly helps you out in becoming a master artist. You can fill whole objects by just dotting the brush on a single item (let’s say a potted plant, the bark of a tree or its leaves) without going outside the lines like an over-enthusiastic toddler. You can keep the brush still and hold in the paint button to have paint slowly spread colour like paper soaking up water. Eventually, you can even discover an MS Paint style bucket that will quickly fill in whole sections and nearby objects one colour. The game will see you painting townsfolks’ houses, painting t-shirt and doughnut designs, recreating masterpieces, and lending your pal the sacred brush to allow them to draw their face into their garden, all in the first hour or two. Chicory could have been released as a simple relaxation tool and it would have been a pretty damn good one.

However, all that is just the backdrop. Colour has vanished from the world and Chicory, The Wielder (the person in charge of keeping the world painted) has quit, leaving you, her cleaner and No.1 fan, with the brush - on top of all this, there's a darkness slowly infecting the world. In order to fight this darkness back you’ll need to return colour to Picnic, but that will take a little more than any old paintbrush. As you progress through Chicory you’ll explore new areas, master new brush abilities, and complete puzzles. These brush upgrades will vary from your paint being luminescent, allowing you to light up dark areas, triggering certain plants to grow or shrink, all the way to allowing you to swim through your paint like some sort of Squid Kid, enabling you to get through narrow gaps or travel along painted vines.

Lost in the forest and couldn’t be happier.

To really bring home the Zelda comparison, the penultimate act of the game sees you travel to four different dungeons in any order you like, so that you can prepare for your final confrontation. The gameplay of Chicory is a bit of a marvel, for large segments of the game you’re just playing an interactive colouring book, taking as much time as you like to “express joy” or paint a beach, but the game seamlessly transforms into a really good puzzle game that rarely becomes frustrating, all while retaining the same simple controls. A lot of Chicory centres around this mixture of puzzling and painting, as it should, it's incredibly engaging and relaxing, but at the top of this review the other standout aspect of the game we mentioned was its characters, so we should explain what makes them so special.

At the beginning of the game you are asked what your favourite food is, and from that point on that’s your character’s name, so for the rest of the review I’ll be telling you about Noodles' big journey of discovery. Every character follows this naming convention from the eponymous Chicory, to the stern Blackberry, your sister Clementine and (my personal favourite local) the super-tough squirrel that only likes “tough” colours, Macaroon. In a lesser game, this fun gimmick would do the legwork when it comes to endearing the player to the characters and that would be that, but Chicory doesn’t stop there. Every character is so personally written that they don’t just feel relatable, they feel like real people. I could probably point to someone in my life that matched up with each of them, their personality, and even their mannerisms perfectly.

We should mention that Chicory’s hint system is just Noodles phoning home and her mom (middle of the image) giving her general advice and then, if you need it, she’ll put your dad (far left) on and he’ll basically say, “Right kid, here’s exactly what you gotta do!” — We should mention that Chicory’s hint system is just Noodles phoning home and her mom (middle of the image) giving her general advice and then, if you need it, she’ll put your dad (far left) on and he’ll basically say, *“Right kid, here’s exactly what you gotta do!”*

These animals are all flawed. They all have their own issues and things they need to be doing. By the end of the game, they’re all worried about their impending doom but at the same time, they’re inherently good-natured people. Everyone knows Noodles is trying her best and everyone gets that she is fighting to save them, and they show it. Even when they are clearly frustrated or upset they try to be understanding and in doing so are incredibly hard not to love.

Yes, this is the same game. Yes, it is genuinely pretty disturbing.

That being said, the story is most certainly not all good vibes and fun times. At the end of the day this world is ending and the person who is meant to be saving it is having a mental health crisis. Without spoiling anything, by far the most remarkable thing Chicory does isn’t its excellent portrayal of depression, anxiety and the crushing weight of expectation - although it does do that better than pretty much any other game I can think of. What Chicory does best is reveal the dynamic - the impacts and the struggles - of those around someone in crisis. I saw parts of myself reflected in Chicory. There’s a moment where Chicory opens up about what she’s been saying to herself all the time and it’s brutal. Chicory hates herself and is trying to cry out for help. Some of the phrases were things I have said word for word to those trying to help me. But then when Noodles tries to offer support, Chicory lashes out, she says things that are hurtful and demeaning and completely out of character. But they're true. To Chicory these things are true. Her twisted view of herself has spread to how she views those around her, and it spreads to the very core of the world itself. Everything is affected by her thoughts, and her internal thoughts break out and hurt those around her. Noodles knows Chicory might not mean what she said, but she sure as hell believes it right now. Her infection spreads, those thoughts, they spread in Noodles mind, exploiting her own anxieties to drag her down too, and suddenly the darkness inside Chicory has spread to those she cares about, their lives, the world.

I’m not going to go any further here, because to mention how Chicory addresses all this would be to rob you of a really important experience you could have.

I’m mainly just annoyed that such a great game had the audacity to remind me of the N64 controller.

I will say that not every aspect of the game is perfect. It does a great job at making up for its issues but they are still there. Small things like erasing colour from certain plants so that they shrink but not instantly colouring them back in by accident are frustrating. This is because the paint button is L2 and erase is L2+R2, so if you release R2 even a split second before releasing L2 you’ll colour the plant right back in and block your own path. But a much bigger issue is using a controller at all. You can fiddle with the settings for the right-stick/paintbrush controls but it just never feels right. Either it’s painfully slow or too fast to paint accurately. Yes, you unlock a fill-in bucket (if you find it off the beaten track over halfway through the game) but up to that point, I found myself taking, what I lovingly referred to as, the N64 position, in order to be able to move while quickly painting using the PlayStation’s middle-pad-button-thing like a laptop trackpad.

But overall these are small gripes. In a game where the music is stellar, the sound design is appropriately wet (or not if you don’t like the sound of squelching), the writing is both heartwarming and profound, the puzzles are clever but not frustrating, and the characters are loveable beyond belief, I’ll take treating my DuelSense like it’s one of video game’s worst controllers for a few hours.

I respect and deeply love Chicory. It’s a game that helped me relax in a way almost nothing else in my life has, while simultaneously making me relive some of the darkest moments in my own life. However, above all else, Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game I worry about. I worry that in years to come many of us will remember it as just another really good indie game, with a cute style and cool ideas. But it deserves so much more than that. Hang it in a damn museum.