Carto is outstandingly cute, and unlike a lot of Cute™ indie games it’s able to back the cuteness up with incredibly creative gameplay. The plot centers around a little kid who accidentally destroys her Granny’s enchanted, continent-altering map. She then has to travel the world to find the missing map pieces and thereby stitch the world back together. Mechanically, Carto is very simple: you walk around and interact with the environment, and then on a separate map screen you can move and rotate pieces of the map, which then moves and rotates the corresponding parts of the environment. It gets really creative with this in ways that I don’t want to spoil for fear of ruining the puzzles. That said, it’s a pretty short experience and I think the developers could have played with the concept more. The core gameplay is so unique, I’m not sure there’s much else like it, and I wish they’d kept going. It’s also a pretty easy game, and I thought at first it was for little kids based on the ages of the main characters and the low difficulty, but then there’s a puzzle that requires knowledge of like, polar coordinates, so who knows.
The art direction and character design here is A+. Loved the hand-drawn (painted?) sprites. The cultures you encounter are all also very unique and I thought they did a good job fleshing them out (a bit) more than just being like, “fire world”, “ice world”, “desert world” etc. Also, I just loved the idea of a little kid wandering the earth with this apocalyptically powerful magical artifact. You use the map to rescue people from an erupting volcano at some point and you could just as easily have used it to move them… closer. The only thing standing between the Earth and ragnarok is Carto’s childlike kindness and fearlessness. Who knows what crimes her Granny is capable of?
Note: if you play this on a Switch with joycon drift, editing the map can occasionally get so, so annoying.
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