Customization, crafting, collecting, and questing are a set of gameplay tasks that when done right go well together. When you add cats, crows, and creatures of all sorts into those sets of tasks, you become beautifully niche. Welcome to Calico from developer Peachy Keen Games.
In Calico, you run a café, bake goods, populate the café with cool furniture, and raise animals that give your café that certain something. You’re also tasked with helping town folks out with their quests and keeping life friendly and fun. At the ground level, Calico is made for a younger audience and is crafted to get those gamers to confidentially complete tasks and progress without much pushback. A core gameplay element that has a positive influence on gamers growing up and gaining more confidence as their gaming lives get tougher. While the game may not necessarily be geared towards a more seasoned set of gamers, it can be mesmerizing for all when you need a break from more involved gaming titles.
So, make those pastries, kidnap some cats for your café, and let’s talk Calico.
A gold mine of gaming for young gamers
Calico has four main elements about it that drive its gameplay: customization, crafting, collecting, and questing. All work in tandem with each other, and that eloquent dance produces a very positive and fun experience that doesn’t touch boredom. That last part is essential for the game’s longevity and keeping the attention of a younger audience.
Let’s break these elements down.
Customization
To start the game, you’re given a character to customize and build out a café and living area to populate with goods and furniture. The character customization is deep for a simple game like this, as you get to choose outfits, hair, traits, and such. While I wouldn’t say you’re getting the Skyrim level of customization, you’re still able to make the character to fit your persona. For young gamers, they will want to be in the game, and this allows them to do so. As you adventure through the title and get deeper and deeper into its quests, you will have the ability to purchase more customizable clothing and further increase the wardrobe of your character. The clothes come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, so there will be a lot of customizable choices. Anytime you can create a good customizable experience that is personal to the player makes for a good time.
Player customization isn’t the only customizable part of Calico, as the player can customize their café. For us folks who don’t dabble in this type of gameplay often, I can tell you that customization of a space is far more relaxing than expected. The café your player takes control of has so much space to put up bookshelves, tables, chairs, and even large skull carpets. There is also an upstairs that is the player’s personal living space, and a downstairs that is the actual café part of the gameplay. Both spaces contain lots of empty bulk to do whatever you want with it. I didn’t expect this part of the game to be as fun as it was. It was relaxing and was a good complimentary component to the whole café vibe. My youngest daughter absolutely ate this part of the game up, as it was akin to her setting up toys and space for those. She connected with the game immediately, which should tell you all you need to know about this hook that drives a good chunk of Calico. Populating and customizing players and space can create a massive amount of content for the experience.
Creating and Crafting
On the crafting part of the game, there are things you can collect to put in your café and improve it. For example, you can collect, create, and craft the most important part of the game – recipes. As you complete your quests and begin to have a successful café, you will start to earn money. That money means purchasing more recipes that you can conjure up for the café. The more variety of food you have, the better your café will do. It’s a simple gameplay aspect that gains a lot of traction when you begin to craft the recipe, as cooking the food is a mini-game of its own.
For every new recipe, you have a new mini-game to play. Yes, you will have to get ingredients, which are endlessly available to your character, and you will mix ingredients in a certain way, and then bake the goods you create to put them on display. Each time you bake goods, you’re timed and awarded with a bronze/silver/gold star depending on speed. Each recipe requires a certain way to make the food, which makes the mini-game attached to the recipe unique. For example, when you make bagels, you create the dough by scratching a cat who kneads it for you. You then must make the bagel shapes with a pogo stick and then must hula hoop the middle of the bagel to stretch it out. After hula hooping, you must throw it into the fryer and fish it out before it becomes bad. The final step is to put the ‘everything’ spice and seeds on the bagel and boom! The bagel is done. How the bagel is created is different than cookies and different from coffee. Everything has a certain method for creation and the recipe variety makes cooking actually kind of fun. Crafting the food and then pushing it out into the window counter seems like you’re doing something successful. As mentioned previously, it is simple positivity that can’t be faulted or failed, which is perfect for younger gamers looking to build confidence in their gaming lives.
Collecting
When you aren’t crafting food or building out your homestead’s digs, you are collecting animals and new ‘things’ along the way to help your café out even more. The ‘things’ part could be flowers, furniture, or even potions. Collecting those items helps to build out your place and plays into the customization of Calico’s experience. Adding more depth to the customization through collection is just a great way to keep driving motivation for continual play.
Collecting animals is also a good way to keep that motivation moving forward. During my playthrough, I may have collected cats, rabbits, and crows to be a part of the café. While the realism of smell is not firmly intact for this adventure, and thankfully so, it was neat snagging an animal in the wild and giving them a home. While that might be considered animal kidnapping in some respects, this game is built for fun and having a variety of animals to raise and chill within your café, which is good fun to me. Just because you snag an animal in the wild, doesn’t mean they’re confined to your café castle. You can allow them to roam freely as they please, chill in the café with you, or party. Yes, party. The animals mixed with other pieces of content in Calico make for a bonus of cuteness and customization.
Questing
While the above would have been enough to catch the attention of young gamers, to keep them locked in with player agency, the game features quests to expand that idea even more. Again, you won’t find the level of Skyrim here in this category, much like customization, but having quests and providing a variety of reasons to keep the gamer engaged with the content helps to expand its longevity. The fact that each quest has its own unique set of requirements, some simple, some primers for bigger quests, helps to push the gamer to keep going. For example, there is a simple quest from one person that asks you to add a spooky piece of furniture to your café. That spooky piece of furniture is easy to find and easy to buy. Once you place it in the café, you’re rewarded with a skeleton rug and an additional piece of furniture. It’s an easy request that will certainly build confidence in young gamers. Then there is a quest that asks you to find out how to access a mountain’s pass. That’s slightly more complicated and pushes the player to expand their efforts to get the task done. Each quest you get pushes you differently. Each one contains its own level of difficulty. These are great ways to get gamers in the mindset to keep pushing themselves, branch out and explore, and help prepare them for bigger gaming experiences sometime down the road. Regardless of the quest, it’s a positive push towards something bigger and better.
All the above elements of gameplay mixed with a big map to travel around and explore help to sell Calico’s content and gameplay design. All these categories create this wonderful experience that older gamers may not appreciate but younger gamers will fall in love with as they continually make Calico’s world their own. Calico does a lot right and rarely does it fall from the paths it set.
Now, there are some hiccups.
HUD and Clips
The only two snags in an otherwise very good game are the HUD and how the graphics clip. Let’s start with the latter and let me throw this out there — the clipping is on purpose. When you enter your café or another structure, the game tries to keep your eyes on what is important without you needing to move the manual right-stick camera to find that importance. While I do commend this gameplay design, because if you know what is going on, then you understand its genius, I think most young gamers will think the game is broken. It’s a bit disruptive to see a wall dissolve to reveal the innards of a structure. While it’s easy to keep up with visually, it still makes the game feel like you’re stuck in an N64 experience where the game can’t handle the 3D structure, so it clips through it. I know the clipping is on purpose, and much like a George Miller film where everything is built to keep your eyes from working overtime, it still brings down the game’s visual quality just a bit. The clipping is not something that kills the game, as the visual cuteness of the experience overshadows this hiccup, but it is noticeable.
The HUD is a different story entirely.
While the HUD is simple to understand through some trial and error, it still might be a bit too much and a little confusing for the younger gaming crowd. When I want to pick up an animal, I can just hit button whatever. If I want to drop an animal, I must search for the drop, as the menu will change with my action. If I want to get to my wardrobe, that’s an entirely different button. If I want to back out of my wardrobe, the ‘O’ button is not the solution. There are a fair number of onscreen instructions for controls during a playthrough, and that could be visually overwhelming for kids. In addition, not all of it is easily accessible when it comes to instructions or finding the right button to push. While the game does its best to keep things simple, it seems like the HUD was a bit of an afterthought. That needs to be cleaned up just a bit or at least more simplified somehow. I do realize I’m a reviewer and I know nothing about the development process, and I know things won’t be corrected instantly with the snap of one’s fingers, but it needs to be redesigned for a younger crowd. This older crowd spent too much time trial and error-ing it. Much like clipping, not a dealbreaker, but it is a hiccup.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Calico from developer Peachy Keen Games is a cute experience that features some good gameplay design geared toward a younger audience. The amount of customization, collecting, crafting, and questing that goes on should lock a Roblox-type audience into its gameplay. There is a lot to do and explore, and that just bodes well for the game’s longevity. There are some hiccups to the gameplay design with the HUD and clipping issues, but nothing that brings down the entertainment Calico dishes out.
