Carto is a simplistic indie puzzle game about assembling a map to navigate through areas. You play as Carto, a cute little girl who has the ability to rearrange the world by rearranging pieces of her map. You can move them around and rotate them, and you must do so in order to make the edges match up.
The core of the game is going around a series of areas, talking to NPCs, solving their problems or following their hints to rearrange the map so as to unlock new map pieces, and then continuing on. This can be about rearranging things to put various pieces next to each other, creating patterns on the map, putting one piece in a position relative to another, or chaining together pieces in order to keep moving in a direction (going west, for instance, or making the wind blow in a way that you can move along through a piece instead of it blowing you off to the side).
Sadly, while the game tries to mix this up in a few ways – as you get to later areas of the game, you start getting into things like two-layer maps or tetromino pieces – in the end, it doesn’t actually end up being enough. The game doesn’t really have all that many tricks, so by a couple hours into it, you’re kind of out of new things to see, and the game never really manages to do anything all that clever.
I was left with the feeling that the game was mildly cute, but I didn’t really feel like it was ultimately all that fulfilling – it wasn’t BAD, it was just kind of mediocre. It is all faintly cutesy, but the puzzles felt too simple for me to feel clever for solving them.
At four hours in length, this game doesn’t eat up vast quantities of your time, but it left me with a feeling a lot of indie games give me – it was a cute idea, but it ended up being a shallower concept than it seemed like it should be, and was ultimately lacking in overly clever gameplay.
2.0