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.