Calico

Peachy Keen Games’ Calico is a community-sim game where you must rebuild and revamp the local cat café. You’ve just moved to take over ownership from your aunt, and everyone on the island is super excited to have you. It’s a slow-paced game for relaxation, where you can just take your time to get everything looking just how you want it and spend plenty of time with all of the adorable kitties, as well as other creatures in the wild, or you can push yourself to get through all of the available tasks and make friends with everyone you meet.

With tonnes of customisation options for creating your character, you can design a relatively close representation of yourself or you can go wild and have a totally unique, personalised character. Whether the intention for the characters to mostly be female was purposeful or not, there’s not much choice for masculine roles, which feels like a bit of a strange exclusion for a game with such a vast array of character creation tools. There’s LGBTQ representation here too, from non-binary characters such as Ash, to flower-couple Blossom and Sunny, which is always nice to see. Playing with your pets and using potions on them to make them big or small, to float or even to turn into a sparkly ‘night’ version of themselves is a lot of fun, as is using potions on yourself to turn yourself into a cat or an ice-cream sundae - or a combo! - and this is a huge selling point for kids too - as our daughter has completely fallen in love with the idea of having so many pets to play with.

If I had to choose a single word to describe the aesthetic of Calico, it would definitely be girly. Everything is very simple and delicate looking, with beautiful pastel colours and pretty furniture - and that’s without even including the adorable creatures! Each of the areas in the world have distinct looks, although there’s not a lot of variety within each of these areas individually. All of the other characters you interact with have their own clothing styles and are well designed - seen more prominently in the character art within the little journal you keep. Estelle and Kiva are two characters whose style I love the most, with both of their dress senses being my kind of style even if they are both on opposite ends of the spectrum. Even the male characters have plenty of pastel colours in their outfits, although again these seem to be more subdued in their design than the girls. There are numerous potions available for purchase as you progress which will allow for altered visuals for yourself, the animals of the world and the world itself, which added a nice, whimsical feel to everything. There are a lot of things I love, with quirky humour throughout with spells going wrong, a cat town filled with upright walking cats (you even see some of them breakdancing, and I don’t know if I was mentally prepared for that!). Even animal names gave me a good laugh, from Captain Bara, the Capybara; Pudgems, the adorable chunky cat; and Horsey 2: The Sequel, the tiny horse with the huge name. The gentle, catchy music works brilliantly here and fits well with the relaxed ‘take it easy’ style approach the game aims for, and has enough variety to not feel like an endless, repetitive loop.

Progression in Calico is done by completing tasks for the villagers of the island, gaining access to new areas filled with new animals along the way. Collecting all of the animals for your compendium is done by simply picking them up, and they can be switched in and out of being in your party, at the café or roaming the island at any time which is great for when you need a specific animal for a task. Upgrading the interior of your café with furniture can be done by purchasing new items from the various sellers in town, as well as being gifted items for completing tasks. Sadly there is no way to increase the size of your café or increase the number of animals you can have living there (a max of 10 at the café, with 5 additional animals following you), so you’ll have to decide what furniture you want out, and who your favourite animals are. Mine ended up looking more like a storage space by the end! Villagers will reward you with money for completing tasks too, and this can also be gained by having food and drinks available for purchase, which will be snapped up whenever someone comes to visit. It starts slow, but by the time you have enough variety of baked goods available for purchase - you’ll be rolling in the dough.

Sadly, I was affected by a number of bugs and glitches whilst playing, including a few game crashes that had to be force-exited out of, losing me at least half an hour or so of progress each time (guess I didn’t learn fast enough to save often!). There’s also frequent occurrences of animals clipping through the floor, and I also had a strange issue where my save wouldn’t load as on my initial start up of the game, I backed out before reopening the game and clicking New Game a second time, somehow leaving a blank file in Slot 1 on the Load Screen (which strangely will continue to say New Game on all three slots regardless). Once I deleted the first slot on a total whim, since I had now restarted the game twice only to ‘lose’ all progress upon closing the game - I figured I didn’t have much else to lose. Thankfully that whim turned out to be a good guess, and I’ve not had that specific issue since and was able to access my previous progress via the second and third slots. Movement has its issues too, with the jumping feeling very floaty, and sometimes it can be awkward to line yourself up to chat with an NPC whilst you’re mounted on any of the animals as you’ll spin in circles trying to stop at the perfect spot. Your walk speed is horrifically slow, and running sadly can’t be triggered with the controller, instead being reliant on walking continuously before morphing into a freakishly hilarious scatter-run, that is sadly also too slow for my liking. All of the buildings and areas in the world you want to visit are spread quite far, with not a lot going on in between, so going by foot takes far too long. But hey - maybe I’m just impatient. Once you have a creature big enough to ride, you’ll find yourself using that almost exclusively to travel, partly for the amount of time you’ll save, but also because it’s so darn cute.

At £9.99 on the Xbox Store, it’s a low enough price to be tempting - and whilst it’s not perfect, it gives you a couple of hours of content that can be done quickly, or at a leisurely pace since nothing really pushes you to move onwards. It’s a great game for kids too, as they’ll have a tonne of fun collecting all of the animals. There’s a lot of things I like about Calico, and I’d love to see it get further updates down the line to resolve some of the worst bugs, as well as add in additional content. As it stands right now, I’ve completed it 100%, gaining all achievements as well as all of the other in-game stuff, such as purchasing all clothing, furniture and potions (which aren’t tied to achievements), so I’ve no reason to continue playing. Extra tasks, maybe in the form of daily tasks to keep a regular stream coming would be a great thing to include, and would give the game far more longevity. There was also a bit of a missed opportunity in terms of the friendship meters in your journal: completing tasks and helping out on the island will increase the number of filled hearts next to each character you meet - however this doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the events of the story, nor is there a way to negatively affect relationships. I would have liked to have seen this expanded upon, too - so I’ll hold out hope for future updates.

In the end, we decided to give Calico the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.

Have you played Calico yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Whitethorn Digital for the Calico Xbox review code!