Chicory: A Colorful Tale is an upcoming top-down game from the developer of Wandersong, and a demo is currently available on Steam as part of The Game Festival. You play a paintbrush-wielding dog exploring a black-and-white world after the Brush’s true wielder, Chicory, vanishes and the world is drained of color. Although you’re only Chicory’s janitor, you take up the Brush and set out in search of answers.
Dragging the cursor across the screen lets you paint, and after talking to a few NPCs, I learned how to change colors, switch brush sizes, color in an entire area, and more. At first, I was a bit unsure of why I should be coloring things in, but things started to come together as I spoke to more characters around town.
Some characters (all of whom are anthropomorphic animals named after food) want you to paint things for them in specific ways, such as one who asked me to paint his house in “tough colors” and another who had me design a T-shirt. There are little side quests like this that you can find, along with gift boxes that reward you with new outfits to wear. It’s difficult to judge the characters from such a small slice of the game, but my few interactions with them left me hopeful that they might go beyond just occasional bits of humorous dialogue. The character who wanted a tough-looking house, for example, later admitted how he’d lost his job and had been feeling vulnerable because of it.
Once I left the village area behind to search for the wielder who had the Brush before Chicory, I encountered the next important use the Brush has: puzzle-solving.
The world reacts in different ways to being painted. Certain flowers only bloom if they’re painted, while others only bloom if they’re black-and-white. What started out as just a neat detail quickly became important as I painted and un-painted various flowers to open up paths and create walkways on my way through the forest. All of the puzzles felt pretty straightforward, but if the puzzles get more challenging (or if you forget what your goal is), there’s a built-in hint feature that lets you use phone booths to call the main character’s parents for advice.
I thought I had a pretty good idea of the sort of paintbrush-wielding, puzzle-solving gameplay I could expect from Chicory, but a surprise was waiting for me as I neared the end of the demo and found myself in a boss battle!
Yes, Chicory has at least a small amount of combat–still involving the Brush, of course. Although I wasn’t quite sure how to judge my character’s health, I painted my way to victory against the boss and earned a paintbrush upgrade as a reward. That upgrade would allow me to explore additional parts of the world, but the demo ended there.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale has the potential to be quite a cute, heartfelt adventure with appeal for both people who want to painstakingly paint every detail of the world and those like me who just add splashes of color here and there. Above all, the demo ended on a note that left me honestly intrigued about where the adventure will go next.
