A fresh coloring book is a daunting enough challenge. Imagine an entire world just waiting for you to get a move on and start tackling all those empty spaces. Puzzle-y platforming adventure Chicory: A Colorful Tale has been drawn up by Greg Lobanov formerly of Wandersong, and has just filled in its own release date. Not to worry though, use whatever colors you like when it launches in June. The world is your coloring book.
“Something terrible happened. Chicory, superstar artist and wielder of the Brush, is missing, and all the color in the land vanished with her,” the creators say. “It’s up to you, Chicory’s number one fan, to pick up the Brush and fill in for her.”
Chicory’s new launch trailer here gets into those story bits of searching for Chicory and some of the other animal pals you’ll meet in Picnic Province.
You can spot a bit of the puzzling too, which looks pretty swell. Different colors look to change the environment around you to create pathways to new areas and solve clues. The developers say that you’ll unlock additional paint abilities as you play which you’ll use to reach new areas.
Alice Bee has already taken a look at Chicory, which she called one of the best Steam festival demos from last summer. She says it’s a game where you “use a magic paintbrush to return colour to the world and also do some pretty intense boss fights that you probably weren’t expecting.” She also explains a bit of the traversal puzzle bits, “involving trees that shrink when coloured in and mushrooms that explode paint when you jump on them”.
She calls the boss fight she encountered “My First Bullet Hell” which, yeah, was not what I’d have expected from a game with a coloring book theme.
Another unexpected bit is that Chicory has local co-op. Neat! Chicory also includes a soundtrack by Lena Raine of Celeste fame. Also neat!
Chicory: A Colorful Tale launches on June 10th over on Steam.