Review anarchistica 2/5 · May 28, 2026
Fischer-Price My First Cozy Game
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Playtime: 99 minutes
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Played: 2026
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Context: I love cats. I also like cozy games, even though many of them aren't worth playing.
Intro
In Calico you run around a tiny map surrounded by invisible walls, talk to people to do fetch quests, decorate a tiny café and make food while you're tiny for some reason.
The Good
Calico has a …
-
Playtime: 99 minutes
-
Played: 2026
-
Context: I love cats. I also like cozy games, even though many of them aren't worth playing.
Intro
In Calico you run around a tiny map surrounded by invisible walls, talk to people to do fetch quests, decorate a tiny café and make food while you're tiny for some reason.
The Good
Calico has a fairly unique, cute style. Character creation is very gender-neutral and freely available at all times. I also like how you can pet all animals, even polar bears.
Bad controls
The first notable thing about Calico is the bad controls. The map is 4 on the keyboard and it doesn't close when you press 4 again, you need to use Escape. Aiming during cooking isn't done with the mouse but with overly sensitive arrow keys. Talking and confirming lines is done with Space, but half the time the button prompt comes up and you press Space you jump instead. Also, rotating furniture isn't done with the mouse wheel but with Q/E. You can rebind keys, but it's still a mess.
Boring quests
Then there's the quests. Cook X food, find X animal, place X furniture, talk to person X. With a single exception that's all the quests. There doesn't seem to be any dialogue outside of quests aside from basic greetings. Also of note is the furniture thing. In Calico you inherit a café instead of a farm. Decorating it and populating it with animals is the creative part of the game. Except the area is tiny, there isn't a lot of furniture and people ask you to put in furniture/animals of wildly different styles during quests so you're not making anything that looks good.
Cooking minigame
Cooking is weird in Calico. You get shrunken to spoon-size and have to jump around/use a tiny elevator to grab ingredients and perform tasks. So instead of putting eggs/etc where you need them while you are big, you do that for some reason. The other interactions like using a hamster wheel to move cookies around in the oven or jumping on cookie dough with a pogo-stick-cutter look cute but aren't interesting enough to do over and over again.
Conclusion
Calico is basically a couple of cute ideas executed poorly. There just isn't much to it, and the few interesting elements are very limited. At some point i placed some furniture but was unable to close the furniture menu, leaving me unable to do anything at all. I think it may be because i rebound the relevant keys, but pressing the original and the replacement did nothing. I had to Alt+F4. At that point i was just done with it.
