Every character is rendered in a vibrant, rounded style that helps support the writing’s cheerful tone. The art style does big portion of cementing this mood thanks to its similarity with children’s books. Instead, Carto and everyone she meets firmly believes they can accomplish their goals if they try their hardest and be kind to others. The people Carto helps on her journey have real problems, like teenagers learning how to be strong enough to leave home or travelers finding their way on a pilgrimage, yet no one is dour or angry about their difficult circumstances. It would be easy to make a story about a lost child trying to harness a world-shaping power into a very dramatic and moody tale, but Carto keeps a light, optimistic, and heartwarming tone throughout the entire game. I really enjoyed this because it felt like an excellent balance between deductive thinking and spatial reasoning and the later puzzles are delightfully inventive.Īside from the excellent puzzle design, another big reason why I like Carto is the way the art and writing work together to create the game’s relaxed and comforting tone. ![]() The puzzles get harder as the game progresses, as is expected, but all follow this same structure, players have the pieces they need and are given an hint for how to organize them. This means players must disassemble a portion of the town on the map piece by piece and reconstruct it so that the left fork extends further than before, causing a map piece with the herbalist hut to appear at the end of the road. What does exist, however, is a road sign that says the herbalist hut is down the road after going left at the fork. An early example of this is a scene where Carto must travel to meet a town’s herbalism expert, but no herbalist hut exists on the map at that time. ![]() Using this contiguous features requirement, Carto’s puzzles challenge players to not only fit together map pieces into a harmonious shape but to arrange them into specific layouts hinted at by characters or other environmental elements. This will be familiar to anyone who has played the tabletop classic Carcassonne, but for those who haven’t, it means that, for example, a piece with a river on it can’t be placed next to any piece that doesn’t have a way to continue the river through the new piece. However, there are limitations: map pieces can only be placed next to each other if the touching sides have matching types. The puzzles are all solved using Carto’s magical map by moving and rotating pieces to reconfigure the landscape into new forms. Being a puzzle game, I expected the puzzles in Carto to be well designed, but I wasn’t expecting them to be as creative as they turned out to be.
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