What happens when your favorite artist goes missing, seeming to take all of the color out of the world with them? You start making art yourself in Chicory: A Colorful Tale.
You are Pizza, a dog with a love of art. So much love that you’ve become Chicory’s janitor to help them out. This results in you being granted a fancy magic brush that lets you color the world (once you master goes missing). Since some nasty force has recently drained all of the colors out of everything, it’s a convenient time for you to start learning how to spread bright colors around.
You’re hopefully a better artist than I am, as I only managed to help Pizza smear huge swaths of color all over the place in the PAX East demo. You’re free to flip between a handful of colors, and can paint these on top of the coloring book-like world. It’s quite satisfying, and the game features a handy mechanic where it somewhat locks you in the lines of whatever you’re coloring. You can push against this to color outside the lines, allowing you to make whatever abstract mess or sharp-looking scene you want.
These colors don’t just liven the environments up, as they also make certain objects and plants behave differently. A colorful mushroom offers a bit of bounce as you walk over it, and some trees grow and shrink based on how you color them. It’s a cute touch that gives the coloring more of a gameplay goal, and it’s a delight to see your colorful meanderings having powerful effects on the place. You also use that same paintbrush to deal with twisted beings that exist in the game as well, so expect to get a lot of varied uses out of your coloring.
Chicory is quite cute, capturing the joy of sitting down and coloring while also offering some charming dialogue with adorable animal pals who could use some help. It’s also…kind of creepy and unsettling? It’s an intriguing mixture of happiness and horror, one I’m curious to see the conclusion to.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.
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