I’ve been playing a bunch of demos in the hopes of finding a hidden gem. One of them is Carto (Sunhead Games). In Googling for the developer, I found out that it’s an indie dev of four people in Taiwan. Very cool! I think I knew they were Taiwanese, but my memory is spotty these days.
I was charmed by the arct style which is hand-drawn and looks like it could be a pop-up card. It’s pastel/water color-y, and some people say it has a delicate paper look to it. I loved the looks of it, and I loved the main conceit.
The basis of the game is that you are Carto, a young girl who is traveling in an airplane with her grandmother when the airplancrashes. She is separated from her grandmother and just starts walking. The main conceit is that there is a map you have to piece together. The edges that connect have to have the same terrain–river to river, forest to forest, beach to beach, etc. When you do it correctly, new events spring up.
I loved the demo and snapped it up when–hey, wait. It was released on October 27, 2020?!? No wonder I had an easy time finding a video walkthrough of it.
I’m shooketh. I thought it was a recent release–as in last month. Huh.
Anyway, I enjoyed the first chapter. The second? Not quite as much because it was short and kind of choppy. Also, the story is frustrating. When I first land on an island, there is a culture there that has the tradition of a child leaving the island and never coming back once they turn fifteen. No one knows why that’s their tradition, but it is.
I know traditions don’t always have a clear root to them, but this felt very video game-y as a premise. I’m not saying it could never happen, but it was so bare bones. In addition, once I went with the young girl on her send-off, that premise was quickly dropped as if it never existed.
This is one of my issues with the game–each chapter feels detached from the one before. Granted, I’m only four chapters in (I think?), but it’s quite a jolt to have a completely different story for each chapter. I think in part because it feels so shallow. I get that the mechanic is the heart of the game, but that has worn thin for me.
Why? Well, I’m going tot get into it in detail, and it feels quite mean to say. This game has so much heart, and it’s clear that a lot of love went into it. I am very impressed that this game was done by so few people. and I don’t want to stomp all over it.
I’m not going to do that, but I am going to talk at length how the charm of the one main conceit wore thin for me.
At first, I really dug it and thought it was so clever. You take a piece of the map and place it in any place it could be placed, and something different would happen in certain of those placings. That’s such a great idea!
Except, at some point, what the game wanted me to do and what I thought it wanted me to do was so far apart. You cannot talk in the game, and there is almost no inventory. I just walked around and tried to put more pieces of the map together. I had a few things on me, but most of them were letters from my grandmother that conveniently appeared when I needed them most.
At one point, there were trees with ribbons tied around them. When I walked by one in a certain way, music would play. There were two of these trees in two of the new squares of the map (one each). I spent the next hour trying to figure out how to get the next pieces of the map. I placed the ribboned trees back to back. No, that was not the way to do it. I tried to just walk by them and place them in a non back-to-back way. That did not work, either.
I finally looked it up and you have to walk by the tree, place the other square next to the one square, and walk by the tree, and there will be music that plays. You do this twice, and then you have to go south. The music is vaguely in that direction but not really? I did it wrong more than once, and when I finally did it correctly, I was disgruntled.
The puzzles only got worse from there. They were not intuitive at all (for me), and I started looking things up earlier and earlier. By the time I reached the fourth chapter (or was it the third?), I was so exasperated with the puzzles, I could not see the charm in the game any longer.
I know this is probably mostly my fault, but it doesn’t make for a pleasant experience. I don’t want to feel like a thickhead as I’m playing a puzzle game. And I do think it’s limiting that you have to do things exactly as they want in order to make progress.
Look, the game clearly wants you to explore and do things your way. You can add the map pieces anywhere you want (as long, as I said, the pieces have corresponding terrain), but now it’s telling me that I have to do it in a very specific way in order to get to the next bit.
This is where me being neurospicy doesn’t help. I do not look at things the way other people do, so I’m not going to come up with the correct answer without a lot of machinations and brain bending. And, let’s gface it, Googling. I don’t like having to look up things when I’m playing a game like this, but I like even less to be stuck for hours. I only get more and more frustrated as I go, which then makes me less likely to solve the puzzle.
I don’t know if I’ll continue with the game. I want to because I like the idea of it, the art, and the fact that the team in Taiwanese. But that doesn’t outweigh the impatience I feel as I’m playing it. I haven’t touched it in a few days, and when I think of playing it, something inside me says no.
It’s a good game, and I know I’m the outlire in this casee as I often am.