• 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.

This game makes me happy. It welcomes you with an explosion of colors, which I never found to be too much at any point.
I didn't expect to like it so much, the impression from the reviews was that it's buggy.
The developers seem to have fixed a lot of the issues that were initially there.
It has many cute characters. Everything about the animals, I absolutely loved. Finding them, keeping them or not. Being able to manage this easily by changing the party/coffee shop/free roam groups, trying out different mounts. Making everything magically possible, gives us a beautiful enchanted world. Yes, I want to ride my cats! And the big one was a nice surprise. :)) The flying controls weren't smooth for me (despite using a controller) but still I was fine with it. The big city inhabitants made me giggle every time I saw them.
I didn't like the cooking mechanics when I first came across it, but it actually wasn't annoying and it went pretty fast with the next recipes. I only did the ones needed for quests. I didn't spend much time on the coffee shop (light decoration and just the basic cooking). The exploring was more interesting.
I'm seeing that I'm really appreciating more relaxed games.
This one is probably a joy for people who have cats.

A couple of issues I encountered:

• For the quest with the red panda: if you had already found it and it's at the coffee shop, you need to put it in your party (you can do that directly from the Animals journal), it will be with you after a few seconds.
• In the Witching Woods, I had an issue with picking-up animals after meeting Rosa. I just Saved and reloaded and it was fine.