This is a game I’ve owned for quite some time but just never got around to playing. The most recent game from the team who brought us the excellent Wandersong, I snagged it on sale a while back but just never found myself sitting down to play it. However, when my partner recently mentioned she was going to play through it, this was the perfect opportunity to both finally get to playing this as well as play something alongside her~. It took me around 9.5 hours to beat the game, and around 14 hours to 100% it. I played the English version on real hardware (and the hardware in question is important, in this case!).
Chicory is the story of the titular character…’s janitor. You play as Pizza, a little dog person who is the janitor for the brush wielder Chicory. It’s the wielder’s job to fill the world with color! With the power of the brush they wield, they and only they can turn the world from a black & white bore fest into a colorful world full of inspiration. There have been many wielders over the centuries, and Chicory is the current one. She’s the greatest! So talented and inspiring, it’s Pizza’s dream to be able to work so close with her. However, in the middle of your cleaning, suddenly the room you’re in and the WHOLE world lose color! Trying to go to Chicory for an answer, you find the brush lying outside her room. You pick it up, just to try it out, before going to her for help, but she’s almost completely unresponsive about it. It’s up to Pizza to go out into the world of Picnic and see just what’s the matter here, and just what is causing the color to go away!
Given that this was from the folks behind Wandersong, I had some sort of idea of what I was in for here. It wasn’t any surprise that, like the main character of Wandersong, Pizza is never actually given any gendered terms, making them an ideal (and much more gender-neutral presenting than Wandersong’s Bard) main character for anyone of any gender. It was also no surprise how naturally and quietly queer the land of Picnic is, as that’s something else I’ve come to expect that this team is very good at (and they do it excellently here too). Also like Wandersong, this is very much a game about being a grown up in the adult world, but I think they hit the thematic beats they’re going for much better here than they did in that game (as well as just pacing the narrative better as a whole). Chicory is very much a game about how your problems don’t just go away once you’re an adult.
Toxic/bad support systems & cycles of abuse, feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and even being bothered by the simple existentialism of it all are main thrusts of Chicory’s narrative and it executes on them excellently. The focal point of all of this is in the creation of art, unsurprisingly, but it goes far beyond that to self-expression as a whole. Chicory is a wonderfully written game and easily one of my favorites I’ve played this year for it. While it’s a game that kids could certainly enjoy and gain a good bit from (especially if they’re more teenage than under-10), I think adults are going to be the ones for whom the narrative of Chicory hits hardest and for all the best reasons.
Mechanically, Chicory is an adventure game not totally unlike a Zelda-type game. You go throughout the world talking to people, solving their problems, exploring new areas, and solving puzzles with the aid of your brush. By either using the right analog stick, the touch screen, or even the right joycon’s gyro (which was the best way to play for me at least), you can guide your brush along the screen to paint the world and everything in it in all sorts of colors. The main difference between something like Zelda and Chicory, however, is that Chicory has almost no combat at all. Whether it’s on the overworld of Picnic or one of it’s many (effective) dungeon areas, there are no normal enemies to speak of.
What there ARE are surprisingly difficult boss fights waiting for you at the end of each chapter, and beating a boss gives you and your brush a new power for environmental traversal (such as jumping). I’m a big Binding of Isaac fan, so I really enjoyed the boss fights and all of the attacks you need to dodge. They’re really well put together fights, but I gotta say, they stick out like a sore thumb in a game with otherwise no action element to speak of, and it really does make me question why they’re here at all. All that said, the game seems to actually understand that already. Not only are the death mechanics very forgiving (I seemed to “die” several times but never was actually sent back? I just instantly revived), you can also tweak the difficulty of boss fights quite granularly in the options menu, and you can even just set them to be skipped outright if you so desire. The overly hard boss fights are really the only negative point I can think of for Chicory’s entire design, and even then, given that you can just turn them off completely as soon as you load up the game for the first time, it’s really hard to call it that negative a point in the first place.
The aesthetics of Chicory are also fantastic. It’s a super cute and wonderfully designed world, with many characters even having unique (or close to it) fonts for how they speak, helping differentiate their un-voice acted dialogue just that much more from other NPCs in the world. The music is also fantastic, with each track complementing its related scene excellently, and especially the boss fights having some really fun and pumping tracks.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you didn’t get it from what I’ve written already, Chicory is an absolutely outstanding game. It’s narrative is one of the best and most poignant I’ve seen in a game, and that’s coming from me the same year I played through Disco Elysium, and the gameplay and aesthetics are tons of fun too. Watch a video or a trailer of Chicory, and you’ll probably know immediately if it’s for you or not, but if you even think you’ll like it at all, you’ll probably absolutely love it, just like I did~.
Chicory is the story of the titular character…’s janitor. You play as Pizza, a little dog person who is the janitor for the brush wielder Chicory. It’s the wielder’s job to fill the world with color! With the power of the brush they wield, they and only they can turn the world from a black & white bore fest into a colorful world full of inspiration. There have been many wielders over the centuries, and Chicory is the current one. She’s the greatest! So talented and inspiring, it’s Pizza’s dream to be able to work so close with her. However, in the middle of your cleaning, suddenly the room you’re in and the WHOLE world lose color! Trying to go to Chicory for an answer, you find the brush lying outside her room. You pick it up, just to try it out, before going to her for help, but she’s almost completely unresponsive about it. It’s up to Pizza to go out into the world of Picnic and see just what’s the matter here, and just what is causing the color to go away!
Given that this was from the folks behind Wandersong, I had some sort of idea of what I was in for here. It wasn’t any surprise that, like the main character of Wandersong, Pizza is never actually given any gendered terms, making them an ideal (and much more gender-neutral presenting than Wandersong’s Bard) main character for anyone of any gender. It was also no surprise how naturally and quietly queer the land of Picnic is, as that’s something else I’ve come to expect that this team is very good at (and they do it excellently here too). Also like Wandersong, this is very much a game about being a grown up in the adult world, but I think they hit the thematic beats they’re going for much better here than they did in that game (as well as just pacing the narrative better as a whole). Chicory is very much a game about how your problems don’t just go away once you’re an adult.
Toxic/bad support systems & cycles of abuse, feelings of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and even being bothered by the simple existentialism of it all are main thrusts of Chicory’s narrative and it executes on them excellently. The focal point of all of this is in the creation of art, unsurprisingly, but it goes far beyond that to self-expression as a whole. Chicory is a wonderfully written game and easily one of my favorites I’ve played this year for it. While it’s a game that kids could certainly enjoy and gain a good bit from (especially if they’re more teenage than under-10), I think adults are going to be the ones for whom the narrative of Chicory hits hardest and for all the best reasons.
Mechanically, Chicory is an adventure game not totally unlike a Zelda-type game. You go throughout the world talking to people, solving their problems, exploring new areas, and solving puzzles with the aid of your brush. By either using the right analog stick, the touch screen, or even the right joycon’s gyro (which was the best way to play for me at least), you can guide your brush along the screen to paint the world and everything in it in all sorts of colors. The main difference between something like Zelda and Chicory, however, is that Chicory has almost no combat at all. Whether it’s on the overworld of Picnic or one of it’s many (effective) dungeon areas, there are no normal enemies to speak of.
What there ARE are surprisingly difficult boss fights waiting for you at the end of each chapter, and beating a boss gives you and your brush a new power for environmental traversal (such as jumping). I’m a big Binding of Isaac fan, so I really enjoyed the boss fights and all of the attacks you need to dodge. They’re really well put together fights, but I gotta say, they stick out like a sore thumb in a game with otherwise no action element to speak of, and it really does make me question why they’re here at all. All that said, the game seems to actually understand that already. Not only are the death mechanics very forgiving (I seemed to “die” several times but never was actually sent back? I just instantly revived), you can also tweak the difficulty of boss fights quite granularly in the options menu, and you can even just set them to be skipped outright if you so desire. The overly hard boss fights are really the only negative point I can think of for Chicory’s entire design, and even then, given that you can just turn them off completely as soon as you load up the game for the first time, it’s really hard to call it that negative a point in the first place.
The aesthetics of Chicory are also fantastic. It’s a super cute and wonderfully designed world, with many characters even having unique (or close to it) fonts for how they speak, helping differentiate their un-voice acted dialogue just that much more from other NPCs in the world. The music is also fantastic, with each track complementing its related scene excellently, and especially the boss fights having some really fun and pumping tracks.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you didn’t get it from what I’ve written already, Chicory is an absolutely outstanding game. It’s narrative is one of the best and most poignant I’ve seen in a game, and that’s coming from me the same year I played through Disco Elysium, and the gameplay and aesthetics are tons of fun too. Watch a video or a trailer of Chicory, and you’ll probably know immediately if it’s for you or not, but if you even think you’ll like it at all, you’ll probably absolutely love it, just like I did~.