Chicory: A Colourful Tale (Game) Review.

CW: Depression, Anxiety, Burnout, Abuse

To start with, let's go over some issues with Chicory. The rest of this review is essentially an emotional experience, so let's just go over some practical issues I had playing the game before we go forward.

The PS4 port seems to be a little broken. Often crashes would occur, and frequent enough, usually 1 per session, which would indicate something might not have gotten a severe enough fix from QA or was ignored to make the PS4 port as it is still unstable and no new patch has been released for it, since it's release over a year or so ago. This is frustrating as the primary interuption to my enjoyment was simply the crashes. Other errors, such as a fault PS4 controller interferring with my enjoyment of it's main mechanic, are simply unfortunate happenstance, so it's sad I have to note this, as going into our review, Chicory may be one of my favourite games ever created.

I no longer write. I no longer draw. Or I did, 'till I wrote this. And Chicory, put simply, brought me back here, to this. Even if my hands ache more, writing, even if time hasn't always been kind to me, Chicory is a story about finding kindness to give yourself in the wake of expectation and failiure. This may be familiar to those who have done things in joyful creation that have then been taken as a sign you must do great things and expected to create until the weight of academia, of society, of those even we care for, causes us to collapse into ourselves and burn out. To lose the passion and drive that made us love doing something in the first place. Chicory is a game entirely about this, and it also about someone who has no expectations placed on them, having them all thrust on them at once and buckling beneath the weight of them.

This game contains an incredibly robust accessbility menu which factors as important due to incredibly useful things such as trigger warnings and content warnings that will even allow you to skip segments of the story that you would find too much and that might cause harm. I never did and can state this segments were affecting, depressing and important to me when I observed them as my love of this game and it's gameplay, revolving around painting and joyfully doing so in whatever manner you can, was essential to understanding why I'VE burnt out as a person and what I need to heal. Chicory is a key to my own journey as an artist and creator and also, a lot of the game revolves around accepting a messy way of painting. If you access Chicory's room or look at the room you start the game in, you'll find Chicory's colors will vastly differ from your own ability to paint the rest of the game. It is impossible, at least to me, to replicate Chicory's colour style once we start the game proper. And in that, we meet the game's key tenent; that you should not be stuck on emulating others from the past and punishing yourself for failing to meet them. Later, when you create pieces that are recreations of other artists work, you'll probably find you won't recreate accurate 1 by 1 remakes of them. And yet, the game has your fellow artists comment on your work and whatever you make, they will have something positive and thoughtful to say, That even if you approach the art with a minmum, withdrawn or even messy effort, that fundamnetally there is still something there within the work, the creation of it, that is worthy. And that view is what's led me here, despite my hesitance writing every sentence, with a broken spellchecker and a quiet sort of hesitance if everything I've written is wrong.

A lot of Chicory, is a journey in pursuit of definitive answers only to understand that we may already possess those answers and we know they may be simpler, more dissapointing, more brutally honest then we would like. We create expectations or ideas, even dreams that are crouched in falsehood, ideas of people that are not only false, but toxic to the truth we perceive and that affect ourselves and those others in palpably negative ways. I've placed this perception on people I know and been continuously dissapointed by others coming short of it without understanding the true need to just sit and discuss this with others. That the dreams I should have, maybe shouldn't be tied to invisible ideas of others, but tangible reality and the joy of creating and doings things myself, knowing I have love and support beside me. Not basing a dream in the shadow of someone, but creating it in the inspiration I find within who I am now. Chicory, thorugh it's mechanics, thorugh it's positivity, through it's story and above all, through it's existence has aided me in realizing my dream is simply to talk and draw and be happy doing so. To maybe see space one day. Things that always gave me joy that I've denied for so long. In that, this game is enough. And if you can make it through PS4 crashes, if you can enjoy it's colouring book aesthetic, with big bold outlines and big characters and places waiting to be filled with whatever colours you can, if you find yourself in Chicory, then I implore you to seek and understand yourself within it. And I'll see you on the other side, friend.