Chicory: A Colorful Tale

I went into Chicory half-expecting a breezy coloring toy with a thin plot. What I got was one of those quietly devastating games that makes you sit with your feelings without once feeling manipulative about it. You play a little dog janitor - named after your favorite food, canonically Pizza - who picks up a legendary paintbrush after its rightful wielder abandons it in a spiral of depression and self-doubt. The whole land of Picnic Province has gone black and white. That's your canvas now. The painting mechanic is the spine of everything here. Each region comes with a four-color palette, and you paint the world using a mouse or the right analog stick. Very little painting is actually required for story progress - the freedom to cover as much or as little as you want is real. But as you move through the Picnic Province's chapters, the Brush unlocks new traversal abilities: painting clouds to jump across, swimming through filled pools of color, making plants grow or shrink by saturating them. What starts as a single simple tool expands steadily into a genuinely clever puzzle vocabulary, and almost all of it feels intuitive. The handful of late-game mechanics that critics singled out as slightly clunky are the exception, not the rule - a minor friction in an otherwise smooth ride. Boss encounters are the only real combat, and they are genuinely inventive: the game's emotional themes literally manifest as shadow-monsters, with the arena shifting to dark negative-color filters while you dodge and paint simultaneously. There is also an option to skip them entirely, which tells you exactly what kind of game this is. The writing is where Chicory earns its reputation. Subjects like impostor syndrome, burnout, depression, and the weight of legacy get handled with a directness that never feels like a lecture. The game even pre-warns you before heavier scenes and gives you the option to step back - not because it is ashamed of the material, but because it respects the player enough to ask. Supporting characters are dense with small, sharp observations: a hotel manager with a stolen-furniture mystery that lands a genuine punchline, a mail route that folds into a quiet side story, NPC residents who respond differently each time you talk to them. Side quests include art classes where you recreate existing works under pressure, a phone-booth hint system where Mom gives vague guidance and Dad gives exact answers, and optional photo-taking, all woven into the world rather than bolted on. Lena Raine's soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. The score moves fluidly between the warmth of the overworld and something darker and more uncertain during the corruption sequences, and it is precisely calibrated to the emotional register of each moment. Audio design by A Shell in the Pit, the studio behind Night in the Woods and Untitled Goose Game, handles everything else - ambient detail that makes the coloring-book world feel lived-in rather than hollow. Local co-op lets a second player join as a second brush, which is a sweet option for younger siblings or couch partners who just want to paint without caring about the plot. Runtime lands around ten hours for a relaxed main-story run, with completionists pushing twenty-five or more if they want to paint every screen. The end-screen timelapse of your entire painted map is one of those small design touches that makes you realize how much of your own presence is embedded in the world. If there is a friction point, it is that the brush controls via analog stick can feel approximate compared to mouse input, and a few puzzle sequences in the later chapters introduce concepts that do not sit as cleanly as the core ideas. These are real observations but they sit in the category of minor gripes in an otherwise well-crafted experience. Chicory is for anyone who has ever stared at a blank page and felt both the pull and the terror of it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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