Calico (2020)

Cozy, colorful, and generous with its best ideas up front: a great character creator (body types, clothing, anthro races), a giantism potion early enough that you can turn your cat into a mount and go explore, and a semi-open world full of animals. The shrink-down cooking minigame is charming the first time around. It taps something childlike where fun doesn't require skill expression or challenge, and for 1-2 hours that's completely enough.

Then it runs out. Dialogue is flat, quests are fetch with no variety, and there's nothing structurally holding the back half together. Free on Epic, walked away at ~2h with zero regret, which is exactly the right way to consume this.

• 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.

This game is INCREDIBLY cute and relaxing, and I have a lot of cute pictures from playing this weekend (and a few are below).

I basically hit a game-breaking glitch last night when I was playing, though, so I can't even play anymore unless I start a new file. [Giant cat carried me off into what was supposed to be the last unlockable area of the island. Instead, it took me into the water surrounding the island while credits rolled, dropped me, got its head stuck in a cliff, and I am permanently glitched off of the island. I can swim around the perimeter of the map but can't go ashore. And I had saved when I first landed in the water, so I'm fucked. :c ]

Gonna give it a while and let them put out some more fixes before I go back to it. Sad, though, because I was enjoying it.

Anyway, some things to note. Before this glitch screwed me, I had issues with three of my active quests. They were the "find these seven rabbits and put them in this pen" sort. For two of them, I found all but one of the animals. All in one small area, no final one anywhere. I turned it off for the night, and the progress on the quests was saved, but the other rabbits were gone from the pen, and the dapper pigeons that I needed to find were no longer walking around when I started it up the next day. So I could never finish those. The third was finding three capybaras in the mountain area, but there weren't any anywhere except for the three that are walking around the onsen.

Other than that, the only kinda laggy part is when you try to place furniture in your cafe. The game lags and stutters pretty badly, but otherwise runs smoothly.

The customization options are great. You can edit your character at any time, and any piece of clothing, accessories, etc., can be any color that you want. The potions that you buy (like to get my hair looking all cosmic, below) are unlimited, so you can reuse them anytime. Good thing, too, because every time I started up the game, my hair was back to what I set it at during character creation.

Cute pictures below!

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