Chicory: A Colorful Tale is an easy game to admire. It’s a small indie effort with a ton of originality and a sweet and positive message at its core. It’s a game that tackles themes of the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that plague a lot of young people and it isn’t afraid to make those themes front and center in its narrative rather than making them substories or side points. It’s got really nice art, one of the best soundtracks of the year, and though it doesn’t control wonderfully on console it makes a strong effort to adapt the clearly mouse and keyboard designed control scheme to the dual sense. This is a really well made video game product.
I didn’t really connect with it.
I want to say all that at the outset because I really don’t want to criticize this game. It’s so well meaning and clearly had so much effort and love put into it that I want to reflect that love back at it. And there is a lot to love. I unabashedly love the soundtrack. I love a lot of the ideas the game has both about game design and life itself. And yet…it was just sort of okay for me and I was glad when it was over. I’d like to explain why.
First let’s start with a brief overview of Chicory as a game. You play a character you name after your favorite food (you don’t know you’re naming the character when it prompts you to do so, but you can also rename her if you so desire). You’re the janitor in the Wielder Tower helping keep it clean for the Wielder, named Chicory, who controls The Brush, the only artifact that can bring color to the world. One day all the color vanishes from Picnic (the name of the area where the game takes place, though it’s not really defined whether it’s a country, an island, something else etc…) and you find the Brush outside Chicory’s room. She’s not responding to you so you take the brush and go out into the world to restore color and make your mark on the world.
Mechanically the game works sort
of like Zelda 1, though with puzzles instead of combat (for the most part.) The map is made up of a series of interlinked static screens and you walk around it. You also control the brush as a separate entity meaning you can paint anywhere you like on the screen even if you can’t walk there. You solve puzzles through a combination of movement and painting. Some objects respond to being painted, such as plants that grow or shrink when colored. Sometimes you need to push an explosive gas bubble into place to blow up some rocks. Later you gain additional abilities that let you do things like jump and swim. You walk around talking to people and getting quests and then make your way to whatever your destination is by getting through the areas obstacles, which tend to be themed around particular ideas such as hidden patterns you need to copy to open doors, or navigating a series of tubes you can swim through to make it through a maze.
You soon learn that Picnic is faced with these curious black trees and roots that seem to be some kind of corruption. Since you have the brush people assume you are the new wielder and expect you to deal with the problem. After you find a source of corruption, usually by solving some puzzles, you face it in a boss battle of kinds where you use the brush as a weapon and avoid attacks by the corrupt entity, which can take various forms. These battles are long and can sometimes be complicated, with rules that the game doesn’t explain, but they are well checkpointed and not very difficult. They’re mostly fun but can be a bit…sloppy for lack of a better term. Especially with a controller it can be hard to get the brush exactly where you want it to be, and some of the enemy attacks come in chunky pixels and the whole thing can feel slightly out of control. That dovetails with the game’s themes, but the battles can drag on a bit and feel a bit annoying. They’re not hard, especially with the generous checkpointing, but they’re intense and lengthy and very at odds with the rest of the game’s chill and relaxed vibe.
As the game’s plot advances there are two main narrative threads. The first is your character coming to grips with her new role as wielder and the second is her growing friendship with Chicory. Obviously the two of these are closely intertwined, and they both focus on the same themes of imposter syndrome, worthiness, legacy, and systematic unfairness. Almost every interaction in the game serves to either forward or comment on one of these themes or ideas. People are excited to learn you’re the new wielder and ask for your help, or they talk about Chicory and prior wielders, or they talk about the current state of the world, implicitly asking for your help in getting things back under control. You have a lot of conversations in the game with a lot of different people, ranging from your parents to random shopkeepers and hoteliers. Some will ask you to design something for them. Some will act as your fans. Some will give you sidequests, like finding lost kids or discovering what happened to some missing furniture. There are a few shops where you can trade in the litter you pick up for décor that you can place in your house or some other locations. The world has a fair amount of interactivity, and underlying it all is your ability to color the world around you at any time, with paint that mostly stays in place and permanently marks the landscape (though you can also erase the colors) These colors are visible from the world map, making the entire land of picnic something akin to one of those paper tablemats at diners you can draw on with crayons, which is a neat effect. You’ll note a slash of color that you used to open a door down in some square you haven’t been to for a while, or a place where you colored a building at someone’s request, and it really does feel like you’re having an impact. There are also collectables, including clothes (wrapped in gift boxes) and brush styles for the brush (wrapped in…larger boxes) and you gather up quite a collection of these over the course of the game.
Ultimately my issues with Chicory stem from the writing. This is a game that’s about visual art, but it has quite a bit of story and talking in it, and a lot to say verbally. There are long dialog sequences, some optional some not, and an absolute ton of conversations and discussion. The message at the heart of Chicory is admirable; everyone doubts themselves and everyone is capable of more than they think they are, and the writing isn’t awful, but it’s so focused on getting this message across that it doesn’t leave room for things like interesting characters or much humor or the things that make writing pop. The characters in Chicory are consumed with whatever their central problem or idea is, and don’t have anything much to say beyond that. Chicory herself is a character built around being a workaholic without outside interests, which makes her…very underdeveloped. She doesn’t really know who she is outside her role in the game world, and you don’t really get to know her either, despite the growing friendship being so central to the story. Your own character goes through a similar arc, and while some of the other NPCs are focused on their own lives, none are particularly memorable or interesting. There’s a hotel employee who is at least funny, and the denizens of the bug queendom are at least different enough to be amusing, but almost everyone else seems to have one character trait each, generally tied in to self-doubt. It makes the whole world feel like a big therapy session.
Which would be okay if the game’s take on psychology wasn’t so simplistic and facile. This is yet another game whose central message is “you’re enough, you can do it!” That’s admirable, but it’s also not nuanced or textured here. The fact is that sometimes self doubt is good and sometimes believing in yourself is not enough. I understand that’s not an easy message to do well in video game form, and people want happy stories, but for me the constant parade of positivity in so many modern games has started to wear thin and seem false. It’s a bunch of fake digital folks convincing themselves that everything is okay and all their doubts and worries are just impediments to success and it starts to seem like The Secret after a while. Chicory tries to do a little bit more with this, and I don’t want to ding it too hard because its heart is in the right place, but I didn’t connect with its ultimate message. Maybe I’m too old or too jaded (I have always been a cynic) but I feel like the game is putting on a happy face while telling the player that it’s fine to be sad sometimes. It kind of wants to have it both ways. I think Lost Words: Beyond the Page is an example of a game that handles this better, with more concessions to the fact that sometimes it actually won’t be okay in the end.
This positivity also effects Chicory’s gameplay. It’s a game about color and art where everything is equally valid and there are no actual challenges or puzzles built around art. There are times you have to draw things or use color but how you do is totally up to you. It’s just that you apply line or color that matters, not how you do it or how good the result is. This again ties into the game’s core message (all art is valid! Talent is whatever you think it is) and from a practical perspective it’s impossible to have a game really judge you on your art, but it makes the actual art parts of Chicory feel like a side issue to things like platforming or puzzle solving. For a game about art that’s a problem. It’s a great message that what you do with the art only matters to the extent it matters to you, and coloring in the world is fundamentally self-directed and fun, but there are literal art classes in the game and they don’t even try to teach you anything. It’s fine to make the art in the game about whatever the player wants it to be about, but ultimately that makes the art stuff both a side show and kind of a not great version of a toy to play with. The game limits you to certain colors on certain screens (though you eventually get your own brush style you can color however you want) but it doesn’t teach you why or how to use those colors and I just wish it did something, anything, more with the concept. The game is generally pretty friendly with its challenges. There's a sheep who challenges you to put together outfits for her, but you can get whatever clothes you want from any area you've visited so you don't need to collect the right stuff to fulfill the challenges, just go to the swap shop and pick out the clothing that the obvious hints tell you to get.
I realize I’ve been complaining for a while and I feel bad about that. Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a game that some people really connect with and that’s great. Not every game is for every person and maybe I’m outside the demographic, both in terms of age and mindset. I can accept that. It’s also a game made for PC and I played it on PS5 and maybe would have liked it more with the greater precision of a mouse vs the right stick/trackpad combo I used. It’s certainly easier to do two separate things with mouse and keyboard than with a controller. About 19% of the people who play the game on PS5 get to the end of the story, so I’m not alone in having trouble fully connecting with it (I did finish the main story of the game, and did a lot of side stuff) but that shouldn’t stop anyone who is interested from giving it a try. It’s unique and for some people it will be quite special. I always like when a game executes its vision with confidence and focus, and that’s certainly the case here. It just wasn’t a vision that ultimately resonated with me.
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