Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a lovely little heavily narrative-based puzzle metroidvania game where you color in the world to navigate the environment.
You play as Pizza, the Brush Wielder’s janitor. One day, all the color in the world goes away, and strange black trees show up in the nearby forest. With the wielder, Chicory, apparently out of commission, it is up to Pizza to go save the day.
The Brush gives you the ability to paint in the coloring-book like world, allowing you to fill in between the lines with colors, and paint the world. This is used to solve various puzzles, from illuminating the environment to allowing you to move through gaps to activate various things in the environment to achieve some end.
In terms of core gameplay, the game is fairly simplistic; you start out with nothing special in terms of powers beyond the coloring, but over the course of the first half of the game gain more abilities – almost all movement based – allowing you to jump, to dive through your paint (allowing passage through small gaps), to climb certain walls, and to swim. There is almost no combat to speak of; there aren’t “normal” enemies around in the world, only bosses at the end of a few dungeons, the source of the “corruption” in the world. As such, the vast majority of the game is a series of navigational puzzles, using your paint to activate things in the environment, move around things that allow you to destroy other things, climb up walls and then jump, toggle switches, etc.
This is pretty easy, but works well enough; it doesn’t feel overly time consuming to solve these puzzles, and in terms of quality they’re not too bad.
There are basically six “dungeons” in the game with bosses at the end of them, plus three other dungeons that have no boss, and one boss without any real dungeon; these dungeons are a series of puzzle with a boss at the end, though a significant portion of most of them take place on the surface. Overall the game is not, in terms of gameplay, all that long – likely only about 8 hours or so.
But you are likely to spend much, much longer on it.
In addition to the core puzzles, you can also paint the world to make it look beautiful, and are indeed encouraged to do so. The game will even save a record of your world map to show you at the end to show your progress in coloring it in.
There are a huge number of collectibles to find – mostly for cosmetic items, though there are also some “brush styles”, which mostly just make stamps but a few of which are things like the fill tool, which are actively useful for gameplay – as well as various sidequests for charters, mostly fetch quests and fedex quests.
On top of all that, there are actual painting minigames, where you are given a blank easel and are told to paint something. There’s close to two dozen of these – and not only do all of these show up in the world afterwards, but a few of them have emotional plot significance, as you paint for someone you care about. This added a lot of time to my playthrough, as it can take a while to create these with the crude tools you’re given; this makes sense, however, as Pizza’s lousy paintings perfectly work for someone who isn’t a real artist but who wants to live up to the great artists of yore who wielded the Brush.
This segues into the other main attraction of this game – the story.
This game has a very cute aesthetic and cute characters. The characters generally cheer each other on in a cute sort of way, or put each other down in a sort of cute sort of way.
But there’s a deeper level to this, and the game ends up playing around in the darker spaces of depression and imposter syndrome as the game goes on – and overcoming these issues.
The characters are, on the whole, very supportive of the protagonist, but also want the wielder to help them – and unlike most games, the game actually deconstructs the consequences of this, with the previous wielder of the Brush – the titular Chicory – becoming miserable under the pressure of doing everyone’s sidequests for them all the time and not having a moment for herself, to be herself, because anytime she took time for herself she was letting everyone else down.
The game basically can be split into two halves – in the first half of the game, Pizza is on their own, going around and fixing the corruption that plagues the world, while Chicory is alone and miserable in her tower. This serves as an introduction to the world and its locations and NPCs, and over the course of this, you end up meeting a bunch of people.
However, it is also very low impact; these people play little role in the plot, and only a few of them actually end up mattering all that much outside of a very small section of the plot. As a result, your relationship with these people is very ephemeral – while you briefly interact with them, you don’t really build a relationship with them in any way, and so you don’t really care much. This makes the first half of the game feel kind of weak – while there is an underlying plot, the fact that no one other than Pizza is really seeing it through means it is harder to care.
But at the midpoint of the game, things change; events transpire that result in Chicory going around with Pizza for the rest of the game, and so for the last four major areas of the game, plus the final boss, you have a companion with you. This changes things massively, because the game is very much about Pizza’s relationship with Chicory and their relationship with the world at large, and the pressures Chicory was under that Pizza has inherited.
This makes the game so much better, and Chicory – who was already the most developed NPC – becomes someone that the player cares about, and wants to see succeed and be happy, reflecting Pizza’s own desires. The player’s perceptions of Chicory evolve with Pizza’s own, and by the end, the relationship between the two is very satisfying, and has moved from idol and janitor to master and student to finally one of friendship and mutual trust and admiration. You do things with Chicory and for Chicory, and she does things for Pizza.
This gives the whole second half of the game much more emotional gravitas and makes the harder hitting themes hit home. The second half of the game also isn’t as cutesy, but it doesn’t forget to be cute, and the relationship that grows between Pizza and Chicory has very serious aspects and very cute ones.
All in all, by the end of the game, you are pumped and primed to solve the world’s problems – and to make Chicory and Pizza’s lives better in the process. One of the biggest flaws with “save the world” plots is that they often feel impersonal, but because of Chicory’s personal investment in the situation at hand, it becomes much more meaningful and important due to that human connection.
There was a moment during the final boss fight that made me laugh with glee, and while I won’t spoil it, it is something that I feel a lot of games really want to do, but which few game manage to earn the emotional investment necessary to pull off. Chicory and Pizza earn their happy ending.
If the entire game was as good as the second half of the game was, this would be one of the best games of all time.
But, alas, it is not.
In the end, this is a game that I’d recommend, but it is not without its flaws. In particular, the first half of the game is not as good as the second half, and the game has a bunch of quite time-consuming sidequests that are very much a mixed bag, particularly doing a bunch of painting side-quests that felt increasingly time consuming and repetitive.
But the aesthetic is great, the second half of the game is great, and the relationship that Pizza builds with Chicory over the course of the game is one of the best in gaming. By the end, you really WANT to see things get better for them, and you genuinely care about them as people – something very, very few games pull off.
(And then you want to ship them, but alas, it is never outright confirmed that they’re smooching, though they are very cute together at the end)
4.5