An interior in Calico.Ĭalico is also plagued with numerous bugs. ![]() There aren't many surprises you won't be given spontaneous gifts or hear random weird conversations like in Animal Crossing, and there’s rarely incentive to improve the cafe or run it well beyond the occasional request from a friend for a specific animal or decoration. There’s a decent amount you can do outside of this-there are lots of toys you can use to play with animals, fashion items to collect and wear, and creatures to find and archive in your notebook-but it starts to wear thin fairly quickly, especially because rewards feel so sparse. You mostly run errands and finish simple quests until the ability to unlock the next area opens up, then repeat the process. If you're expecting even a basic cafe-running simulation, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as there's very little you actually do with the cafe besides set up furniture and sometimes bake things. It's a very basic gameplay loop, but also Calico’s biggest problem: It's very simplistic. At certain points, you’ll need to open up a new section of the world, which involves completing a specific quest chain, in order to progress further. You won’t find anything in the way of conflict or combat here-the worst that happens is some characters feel awkward talking to each other and need you as a go-between. Many of them will ask you for help with various minor problems, like rounding up animals or baking a specific treat to give to a pal, and will reward you with money, fashion, furniture, and recipes for the cafe. You’ll meet plenty of new faces as the game progresses, including potion-making witches, nature-loving flower friends, and even a few furry human/animal hybrid folk. ![]() It’s a very laid-back, play-as-you-please experience in the vein of other life-sim games, but with an air of play and fairy magic baked in: You can buy potions with funny effects to use on yourself and your animal friends, like shrinking down to mini-size to cook, zooming around while riding on giant red pandas and bunnies, decorating your house with clouds, flowers, and cat paws, and collecting basically any animal in the game (that isn’t already someone else's pet) to be a part of your cafe or your traveling posse. Your job is to fill your little cafe with animals, decorations, and cute kitty-themed pastries while exploring the world and helping your new friends with various errands. Calico is very cute (screenshots captured on PC).Ĭalico starts off with your created player character inheriting a cat cafe in a faraway world where magic is very real and a part of everyday living. But while Calico's concept and visuals are a delight, the simplistic, bug-ridden gameplay dragged me kicking and screaming out of the childhood fantasy world I so wanted to exist in. ![]() ![]() Calico embraces an aesthetic and theme that is shamelessly, unabashedly girly in the best ways-a world of happy magical girls living in pastel-colored lands with fluffy, cotton-candy trees where all kinds of lovable animals roam freely. Had my third-grade self seen Calico, an open-world animal cafe and social interaction game, she would have lost her mind. Sure, I loved the fantasy worlds of Mario and Sonic, but I also wished there was a fun gaming playspace for me that echoed the fluffy-cats-and-rainbow-unicorns aesthetic of my Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers. At the time, games were largely considered "boy toys," so moving from typical "girly" things like princess dolls and My Little Ponies into gaming was jarring at times, especially since not a lot of games catered to the cute, colorful things I’d been enjoying at playtime to that point. It was something of an awkward transition. I was quite a young girl when I first got interested in video games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |