Calico

Calico is a wonderfully weird and whimsical game. With a few tweaks to the rendering of the game, a few glitch fixes, and the ability to customise the controls, it would be an ideal island to visit for a few hours at a time. If only I could get my Animal Crossing island to have the same atmosphere…

The game does deliver what it promises: magic girls, animals, cute furniture, a relaxed pace, and the chance to bend the rules with magic and ride a giant cat. However, it also has some glitches, a few quirks in its gameplay, and some slightly iffy controls. How much you get out of Calico will truly depend on how much you love its themes as well as your tolerance for glitches. It will also matter if you were looking for a game that lets you actually run a café, since this aspect of gameplay is surprisingly passive.

The troubles I had were as unobtrusive and gentle as my enjoyment. You’re so laid back, that something like floaty controls or vanishing walls is barely an inconvenience. Conversely, the soft pastel skin of this game is difficult to get a grip on. Players looking for a more involved life sim will come up short, but if comfy gaming is your aim, you’ve struck gold. Calico is a brief, blissful vacation in a world of gentle magic and cute companions. If you’re looking to just relax for a little while, Calico will be exactly your speed.

While Calico‘s current state is vastly improved from its initial release thanks to these patches, its initial launch state can’t just be swept under the rug. But the continued effort to improve the game, combined with its welcoming, comforting, and charming nature shining through these unpleasant mats of fur, makes it clear that Peachy Keen Games is a developer with a lot of potential — and I can’t wait to see what they can do in the future with more experience.

Despite its best intentions, however, there are issues and flaws when it comes to execution that stand in the way of Calico becoming a much more enjoyable game. While Calico has plenty of good ideas, it would do wonders for the gameplay experience if the aforementioned flaws were corrected in future updates, as this would allow the game to live up to its true potential.

Calico prides itself on being a game that ‘makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside’, and of that, it succeeds. Unfortunately, it’s currently let down by a lot of strange bugs and awkward controls.

The worst thing I can say about Calico is that it’s undeveloped.

Calico lands on Nintendo Switch with a cafè to manage and many, many cats.

My eight-year-old self would have absolutely loved Calico to bits, I'm sure. Unfortunately, I am no longer a wide-eyed, curious 8-year-old girl--I'm a game reviewer whose tolerance for bugs and simplistic gameplay has worn thin over the decades. As much as I wish I could view Calico through the eyes of an imaginative youngster, I can't. Perhaps if you are better at embracing your childlike fantasies, you may be able to overlook Calico's many flaws and appreciate its imaginative, fairy-dust-sprinkled charm, but I feel that the magic will wear thin quite quickly.

Combining cats and other likeable creatures with a café should be a winning formula, but unfortunately Calico fails to offer an enjoyable time. Cute graphics and inventive concepts alone do not excuse the multitude of issues that give the game a feel of a draft version, rather than a finished product despite post-launch updates. Perhaps one day running a cat café will run like a dream, instead of a cute-themed nightmare.

Calico is still a little too buggy for us to recommend. It's fun to ride a huge cat off a cliff in an ice cream sundae outfit, but less fun when you get stuck in said cliff and your face turns inside-out. There's a lot of love in this game, but it doesn't quite outweigh the issues – and given that we've already seen more than one patch issued since launch, we're not convinced the developer can pull this one back from the brink.