![]() Outside of some swift sidequests, Chicory refuses to bog down the player with excessive gameplay or meandering design. Taking time to color in screens and absorb the fulgent landscape of your own creation acts as a nice breather in-between Chicory’s ten rapid-fire story chapters. While the main campaign can be beaten in a manner of just six or seven hours, you’ll likely spend much more time dwelling in the world of Picnic, which is segmented into equally-sized screens across a large grid. The colors in each area rarely match up with how the area should look, with the unique palette allowing your own color work to feel like an abstraction rather than a realistic depiction of the landscape. This allows each area of the overworld to feel distinctly different regardless of how you color the map, and also meshes well with Chicory’s theme of artistic imperfection. In the murky Gulp Swamp, your colors switch between washed-out greens and grays, while up on Dessert Mountain, you’re given a palette of light blues and purples to match the snowy theme of the mountain’s peak. While the game could have allowed you to use a wide variety of colors, your brush is limited to four colors at any given time, which cycle depending on the area, though there is one NPC who will give you permanent colors to use. One of Chicory’s interesting artistic design choices is the restrained color palette. It runs smoothly with great performance in all areas except where water is present, but the tradeoff is more than worth it for the precise mouse control while painting. However, despite being primarily marketed for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, the best way to play Chicory is on a computer with a keyboard & mouse. ![]() Your brush is controlled by either a mouse cursor or a control stick, depending on the setup you’re using. Some objects you can fill in by just tapping them, and the cartoonish, thick-lined artwork by artists Alexis Dean-Jones and Madeline Berger makes the Pacific Northwest-inspired landscape of Chicory’s overworld feel like an interactive coloring book. ![]() Picnic is quite literally a blank canvas-the world is entirely black-and-white with shadows and textures distinguished with dithering rather than using actual grays-and you can color anywhere on the screen with the brush. As part of this new role, she must restore color to Picnic and defeat the evil corruption that’s spreading throughout the world. Burger stumbles upon the brush and becomes the new wielder, despite not having any formal artistic training. One day, the world of Picnic is robbed of all its color. ![]() The titular rabbit is a wielder-a trained artist who uses a tool known as “the brush” that is passed down from generation to generation and used to color the world (think Avatar: the Last Airbender for Picasso fans). In Chicory, the newest game from Wandersong developer Greg Lobanov, you play as Burger, the loyal janitor to Chicory. However, Chicory is easily one of the most unique games of the last few years due to its blend of artistic direction and gameplay. With its bubbly art style, cute animal characters and an overworld that looks like it could be ripped straight out of a Gameboy-era Zelda game, it might be easy to shrug the game off as yet another hackneyed attempt at capitalizing on Nintendo nostalgia of the 1990s. On first glance, Chicory: A Colorful Tale looks almost indistinguishable from many current indie gaming releases.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |