Review: Calico
Yes!! You Can Pet the Animals: Calico Reviewed by @Palkuka
I want to reiterate to you that in Calico, you can pet every animal in the game!!! It’s every gamer’s dream! I could end the review there because it’s reason enough to buy Calico, but let’s dive into this sweet, magnificent, and colorful game. Calico is an adorable addition to the sandbox genre of gaming. It has bright and happy environments, cheerful music, and the best part is that you can shelter animals you find in-game.
The premise is that you had just opened a magical café in a fantastic world of friendly neighbors and free-roaming animals. As you venture around, you can tame animals to follow you in a party, or send them to hang out and be the main attraction of your café. You also collect furniture to spruce up your café and also use magical world items. Those items slightly change the experience you have in the game, but most of it is cosmetic for the fun of it. It’s a cute game for all ages, but definitely a game to relieve stress and unwind.
The first thing you get to do in Calico is customize your character, so have fun doing that for an hour… or two, lol. It’s really inclusive of how much customization they’ve programmed for character creation. It opens up a wide range of body types and allows you to represent your own body type or any body type you would like. Later on, you can find outfits and clothing that are mostly colorful and cute. Once you’re in the game, there’s a short explanation on how to name and collect animals, and then it’s time to have fun.
There’s no hurry to do anything and it’s all about making your café as cute as it can be. There’s a really cute cooking feature too, but I’ll leave that as a surprise because it’s imaginative and fun. I ran towards every animal and started filling up my café with cats, birds, a red panda, and I really wanted to find a snake, but I haven’t found one… yet. There are short and easy quest lines that are simple but involve quite a bit of travel around the map. Later on, you’ll be able to tame bigger animals and mount them to roam around. I would try to remember names of the NPC’s because some of the quests ask you to visit those neighbors.
Calico is such a stress-free game. You should definitely add it to your collection. It’s peaceful and whimsical. I highly suggest buying Calico for PC on Steam because there have been technical bugs on the Nintendo Switch version that still might need a few more patches to work out. Calico was developed by game developers who represent the LGBTQIA+ community, which is even more of a reason to support this game. I really want to see more queer game devs in the future, so please support Calico and get your copy today.
