Chicory: A Colorful Tale Embraces the Bitter and the Sweet

For every creative, the act of “making” means something different. For me (and many others, I hope), it’s the source of a deep anxiety—being a creative is my job, my main form of income. I am my own manager and my own agent. All the work I do comes from inside; if I’m not in the right space to create, then nothing will be made. No work will be done. There’s a complex web of people and expectations that coil around every artist, writer, and musician. You have to account for deadlines, health issues, schedule conflicts, and many other extraneous factors that precede the actual act of making something out of nothing. All of this stacks up, and, if you don’t properly manage it, it can easily come crashing down.

That’s exactly what drives the plot of Chicory: A Colorful Tale—burnout. At the game’s start, a dog janitor named after your favorite food (mine was named “Curry”) is happily cleaning the studio of Chicory, the current wielder of The Brush, a tool that brings color to the world. Shortly after, all of the color in the world is sapped away. Curry finds The Brush discarded outside of Chicory’s room, and impulsively takes it for their own because they admire Chicory and want to be more like her. They soon find themself embroiled in the removal of cosmic distortions around the world, which seem to come from Chicory herself.

When we meet Chicory, she’s quite different from how she’s displayed in portraits around the tower. She’s curled up on her bed and has massive bags circling her eyes. She doesn’t seem to care that you’ve taken The Brush, saying she’s done with it and she doesn’t care who becomes The Wielder next. Curry takes that to mean that they are the new wielder. The game then follows their escapade through a quaint food-themed world. Chicory follows a pretty simple and familiar structure—you move from screen-to-screen and solve simple puzzles using the abilities you learn from The Brush. After you complete each area, you get a new ability that will come in handy in the next section, but that also opens up pathways to hidden treasures in the game’s various towns and previous sections. It’s rather Zelda-like in this regard; there’s a lot of backtracking available for those that really want to get into the collectathon, but the path forward is always obvious and you’re always well-equipped to face whatever challenges lie ahead.

The game is perhaps best enjoyed with a keyboard and mouse, where the mouse controls The Brush (which can interact with anything on the screen, fully untethered) and the keyboard controls Curry, who has to physically reach their destination before moving to the next screen. While the game is about art and painting just as much as it is about a forward-moving adventure, the level of investment you put into the art aspect is completely up to the player. I’m not a skilled digital artist by any means, so I often moved at a pretty quick pace, but even I stopped to fill in the coloring book-like screens every once and a while. There’s a therapeutic joy to interacting with the more artistic aspects of the game, but it always stays accessible with what’s expected of you. One interesting sidequest involves Curry restoring classic paintings created by previous wielders at an art academy, which then get placed into a gallery for the player to view. I managed to feel proud about what I made even though I’m not an especially talented artist; the game has a way of encouraging you to stretch your creative spirit, and it’s one of it’s most fulfilling elements.