Calico is a cute slice of life simulator developed by Peachy Keen Games and published by Whitehorn Digital for the PC that allows players to open and decorate their own pet café. Players can travel through an open-world map to collect cute animals they can bring to their café, as well as aid the local townspeople. While the game boasts a colorful world for players to explore, much like Story of Seasons or Animal Crossing, there are some stumbles in the overall mechanics that impact both playability and enjoyment of the game.
Players have the ability to decorate their Calico café and upstairs bedroom, as well as explore a large map. They can interact with the people in the town as well as animals that are wandering through the trees and buildings. However, the UI for the game is cluttered and difficult to navigate - even interacting with animals when holding them vs when they are on the ground has two different interaction maps. Decorating the café requires a lengthy and difficult system of pulling items one at a time from the players bag, then carefully toggling them on a jittery grid to set them down correctly. The overall interaction with the control interface is often difficult to the point of frustration.
One of the biggest successes for Calico was the character creator for avatars. The creator isn't based on gender, allowing players complete creative freedom. They can toggle weight, hip size, leg size, and carefully craft their character's facial features. While hairstyles are lacking in selection, the skin and hair can be just about any color the player would like. However, this careful detail is lost when the player starts the game. Unfortunately Calico has an issue with low resolution, and players can barely make out details that they may have spent a large quantity of time perfecting.
In it's current state, Calico has a number of difficult bugs that can make gameplay frustrating. The first is with animal animations. Players can collect toys to play with the animals living in their café. However, when a toy is pulled out of the inventory, the targeted animal contorts and drops to the ground like a ragdoll, being pulled and dragged about in a twisted heap. For some, this could really take away the enjoyment of being able to play tug 'o war with a puppy or entice a kitten with a toy on a string.
The other issue that Calico struggles with happens during the cooking mini-game in the kitchen. When a player decides to cook treats for the café, they are shrunk down to scurry over the countertop, using the recipe as a guide for what ingredients they need to pick up and toss in the mixing bowl. However, gravity doesn't appear to work correctly when a player is selecting ingredients, and it is easy to throw the items well past the bowl, or kick them into areas that the player can no longer interact with. Because of this, players will find they must reset their mini-game frequently to be able to access the ingredients again.
With a vast forest to walk through and a town to meet other characters, Calico's world is colorful and stylized. However, there is a distinct lack of things to interact with, outside of the animals and people, for how big the space is. Instead of being able to forage or find hidden items, players are left to speed through the wide open spaces trying to get where they need to go. While travel time can be cut down with a mount, it feels like a waste to want to hurry through the world instead of wanting to stop to explore. An update where flowers or other collectables were added like in Animal Crossing could greatly increase the enjoyment of traveling over the map.
For fans looking to pick up a new simulation game with a sweet art style and fun mechanics, they may want to wait a while before trying Calico. The game has a lot of potential, but in its current state the bugs and interface can make playing less of a relaxing escape to a pet café, and more of a frustrating battle to get anything done. Calico could have benefitted from a little more time to polish the rough areas in its gameplay, and maybe another look at cleaning up the graphics so the unique art and detailed avatars could really shine in the pastel wonderland of the world the developer has created. For now, though, the multitude of issues plaguing Calico make for an experience that's hard to recommend, though a few sizeable fixes could turn things around for the charming title.
Calico is available now on Microsoft Windows and the Nintendo Switch. A Steam PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.