Carto is a puzzle game that tasks you with rearranging map tiles in order to solve puzzles, and it reminds me a bit of Tengami despite my complaints about the two being entirely different. Mostly, I can’t help but draw the comparison because I had trouble staying awake throughout both games. Carto starts off with an interesting premise that’s then driven mercilessly into the dirt by same-y fetch quests and locations, only becoming more interesting once you’re several hours into the game. I would have missed out on the writing turning a corner and becoming kind of charming if I hadn’t stubbornly refused to quit playing from the sheer boredom of those early hours. Even the puzzles become more creative later on, though the difficulty is all over the place. At one point, I got turned around in a cave for what felt like an hour. Toward the end of the game, however, I was accidentally solving puzzles before I understood how they functioned. Carto is inoffensive. It’s unambitious. It’s a perfect storm of blandness.

Carto‘s story takes forever to get going and then awkwardly pads itself out, but it’s nice

Protagonist Carto and her grandmother are airborne cartographers who have an inexplicable ability to change the world below them by altering their maps (which are broken up into square-sized chunks). The game begins with Carto mindlessly combining an airship and lightning storm tile—which in terms of dumbness is equivalent to dropping a piano on yourself—and causing ship damage that results in her falling to the ground and becoming separated from her grandmother. And then nothing much happens; the early parts exist to send you to a bunch of same-y forest and grassland areas so that you can do busywork for characters who will return later on in better roles. The first several hours of Carto spends so much time planting seeds for later that it forgets to be interesting in any way. It doesn’t help that all of the early areas are too large and look the same.

But like I’ve already mentioned, the story does get better. This turnaround begins when you reach the library with the self-writing, mostly optional books that catalog everything from Carto’s quest to the traditions of the various tribes of people you encounter, which helps to fill in a lot of the lore that’s implied in-game. Even then, it takes quite a while before the characters themselves become worthwhile. Shianon, for example, is a young girl who is forced by her culture to embark on a coming-of-age pilgrimage and becomes Carto’s friend in the process. It takes a long time before they’ve encountered enough together for this dynamic to be believable.

But it does take on an admittedly sweet quality after a while, and the return of lesser characters has a similar (though lesser) effect. The main problem with the writing throughout the game is that Carto doesn’t know when to end. You spend much of the game receiving paper airplanes with messages from Carto’s grandmother on them arranging meeting spots, only for each destination not to suffice for one reason or another, and I was over the running around by the end of the enjoyable volcano area. There’s still quite a bit of gameplay after that point, however, and each contrived explanation for why Carto and her grandmother failed to meet up aggravated me more. Carto‘s gameplay gimmick is solid but not solid enough to prevent all of this extra-bland busywork from wrecking the pacing.

The gameplay stretches a poorly explained gimmick farther than it can comfortably go

Carto‘s main selling point is the novelty of picking up pieces of the map and then connecting them to similar parts of the map, allowing you to rearrange the shape of nearby areas. The main way this is incorporated is by receiving directions that you then have to make accurate. For example, if a sign says that something is to the east of the sign, placing some connecting roads there can cause a new tile to appear. Toward the end, you have to Catch Specific Fish to win a fishing contest, and the only way to catch specific fish is to rearrange the lake until it resembles them. Some of the puzzles can be enjoyably clever like this, giving you just enough direction to figure out your goal without spelling out how everything works.

My favorite puzzle is a desert chest with a bunch of numbers on it. I couldn’t figure out what these numbers were referencing until I realized that all of the numbers were divisible by 90, meaning that it was a combination. There are definitely some solid puzzles in Carto that strike that ideal balance of “super hard at first glance and totally obvious in hindsight,” but they’re outweighed by the obtuse ones.

It’s not always clear what you’re being asked to do, and your progression sometimes hinges on truly bizarre things that you’re not likely to think of trying. Early in the game, I got stuck for a bit because the part of the map I needed could only be obtained by interacting with a sheep. Unless I sleepwalked through part of Carto‘s early game (and you can check to see if I missed an obvious clue—the first video embedded into this review is from this section), there wasn’t anything that hinted that one of the sheep had a map. I had even interacted with these particular sheep. Asking the player to interact with wildlife repeatedly is unreasonable given that most games use them as simple decorations. Players are conditioned to ignore animals. It’s needlessly hostile game design.

There are all kinds of stuff like this in Carto. At one point, you get stuck in an erupting volcano without a rope to escape with. The solution? Open the map and twirl the volcano piece in circles to create a tornado that sucks you out to safety. There’s no hint about this, and the mechanic is used once in the entire game. At another point, you have to relay navigation instructions to Shianon based on the direction a worm is pointing in your inventory. Making a mistake doesn’t lose any progress, thankfully, but you’re never told which part of the worm is the pointing end. Stuff like this is a nightmare early on because you have to earn the right to run. Much of the early game consists of slowly walking around the world. It’s agonizing. And naturally, this slow movement is the speed you’ll have to finish most of Carto‘s many fetch quests with. There’s no reason for any of this.

Carto‘s visuals are decent, minus the same-y green areas, and the music is present

There’s something about Carto‘s visuals that led me to believe that I’ve seen a lot of this art style, but the only comparable art style I can remember is One Eyed Kutkh, and digging several years back into the archives confirmed that I haven’t played anything with a comparable look since. I don’t know why I felt that I’ve seen this art style so much, but it’s serviceable. It doesn’t really stand out, with many tiles looking virtually identical to others and character animations suffering from a weird, arguably charming floatiness. Characters are expressive, though. Carto‘s areas tend to be a bit on the bland side when you’re wandering through trees and grass and combinations of trees and grass, but later areas are more visually distinct. This is an art style that I have no strong feelings about one way or another. My only real disappointment with the visuals is the apparent lack of 4K support, with the game’s resolution maxing out at 1920x1080. At resolutions beyond that, the image is stretched to fit. It’s a little disappointing.

I also don’t have any strong opinions about the game’s music. Again, Carto is the kind of blandy bland bland that makes it hard to feel anything toward any of its individual parts. If I had to describe the soundtrack, I’d probably go with “it sounds like a collection of moderately annoying jRPG town themes with some forgettable synth pads thrown in for variation every once and a while.” It’s all fine. It doesn’t give me a headache, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what the soundtrack sounded like if I didn’t have recordings. It’s repetitive and generic but better than silence!

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Carto review – The blandest blandness to ever bland first appeared on Killa Penguin