Chicory was vaguely on my radar from past GDQ events and maybe a PAX from The Before Times, but it wasn’t like high on my list of games to play. As per usual, it finally popped up on Xbox in Game Pass so I queued it up to play with my kid.

It’s a weird game, about food-named animals living their lives in food-named towns, protected by a lineage of artist-mages who wield a magical paintbrush. The game opens on your favorite-food-named-protagonist (who we named “MacNcheese”, just barely within the character limit) in her role as a janitor for the current Wielder Chicory, when all color is sucked from the world. Chicory is unwilling to continue in her role, leaving it to you to figure out what’s going on.

Mechanically the game is a top-down puzzle platformer with some basic movement / progression powers based around the game’s core mechanic of your paintbrush. The entire world of Chicory – the ground, characters, buildings, the game menus, everything – can be painted on at basically any time by swooshing around the right stick and holding trigger to paint. You can do this independently of character movement, and you’re eventually expected to do both simultaneously which is big head-pat/belly-rub action.

Painting is used as the critical feature of puzzles throughout the game. Need to toggle a bush so you can use it as a bridge? Paint it. Gotta launch your doggie across the map? Paint a springy plant. Gotta light up a dark room? Paint it (neon). Need to squeeze in a tight spot? Paint it and dive into the paint. It’s paint all the way down. There’s also in-world stuff where characters literally need you to paint something, so, obviously, you have to paint. Like there’s art classes and companies who need logos designed, and generally an abundance characters who are sad the world is no longer colorful.

Chicory has a reasonably heavy story for a game so adorable. It’s about feeling like you’ve failed to live up to society’s expectations. It’s about doubt and depression. It’s about feeling unqualified for a job and woefully unprepared. It’s also about coming to terms with all that, accepting that quitting and failure are two different things, but also that failure isn’t inherently bad or permanent. It’s ok to fail, it’s ok to not feel prepared, it’s just a matter of how you move forward.

I enjoyed Chicory quite a bit. I probably wouldn’t have sought it out without Game Pass, but I’m glad I did. What made me sad, though, was that basically all the achievements on Xbox were “Diamond” ones, so < 5% of people who played it got it. And this was for everything, even unmissable story-based achievements. It’s understandable when you get that for games when you’re playing them within hours of launch, but a month in it’s . . sad.

I recommend it. It’s not a game for everybody, but it’s also short, so give it a shot. Pump those achievement numbers up.