Carto (Xbox One)

Accurate maps help bring the world together. With a good map you can find your way to something new and return home safely after, and with travel and trade so tied to them, a single inaccuracy could have surprising consequences. Carto, an appropriately named cartographer, surely knows this, but there’s something different about how this quiet young girl makes maps. Carto freely edits her maps and moves locations around constantly, but with her special map, rather than that leading to issues, it can solve them as the actual land adjusts itself to be just like how she laid it out.

 

Carto begins when the young cartographer falls out of her grandmother’s airship, landing on an island that doesn’t seem to be much until she starts finding shreds of paper from the map she had pulled out of the aircraft with her. Carto can’t actually do too much usually, able to lightly interact with objects and walk around, but popping open her map gives more control over the world than anyone. The areas of Carto are divided into tiles, the player able to pick them up and move them around on a grid to reconstruct the island in whatever way is necessary to make navigation possible or to help solve a puzzle that’s obstructing progress. There are a few rules to this system, the main one being that the edges of a tile must smoothly connect to similar areas. A forest must connect to more forest, a trail a trail, and water must flow into more water, and since the squares of land are a decent size, sometimes putting them together is almost a jigsaw puzzle as you make sure the edges all line up properly.

However, your map doesn’t have to make too much logical sense either. If you don’t want to use a piece currently you can drag it off and leave it to the side until it’s needed again, and even if there are people inside that tile they don’t often seem to know anything’s going on. They’ll recognize when a solution suddenly appears after you shuffled things around properly, but the reshaping of the world is Carto’s unique gift and it is used to pretty good effect throughout the adventure. Some early puzzles really are just as simple as making sure you know how to connect similar tiles properly, but later you get things like having to shift around the floors of a tower so staircases connect to access new rooms. It goes beyond simply lining up borders or land features as well, players eventually rotating tiles to shift objects around in inside of them and working to construct specifically shaped bodies of water to make certain fish appear. Tiles can start being different shapes or impact multiple layers of a vertical space when moved as well, so Carto’s simple premise does get put through its paces while tying them to a nifty set of puzzles.

 

There are a few moments where the game maybe holds back a little too much information though. While you can talk to characters for a general idea of what you should do, the game sometimes wants you to create new tiles by placing your current batch in specific arrangements, and sometimes it seems a little too picky in exactly how they are positioned. Usually it’s a case of not knowing why your solution didn’t work until you make a few minor adjustments and then it clicks in the way the game prefers though so these usually don’t slow you down for too long and there’s more fascinating little twists to how the map altering mechanic can be used than there are lightly odd ones. Overall many of the puzzles are light interactions though where the new arrangement allows Carto to grab an important object or enter a new space, but there’s something beyond just the interesting map redesigning to make Carto hold your interest.

 

As Carto travels the world looking for her grandmother, she’ll find each new major area has its own inhabitants with their own culture they’re willing to share. While some of their traditions end up playing into puzzles as well, their bigger addition is the small cast of characters each new setting brings with it and the bits and pieces you get to learn about how they live. Carto is a very quiet girl, preferring to share her opinions with expressions rather than words, but she is open to learning new things and gets to participate in various little rituals and help people with their customs. She’ll join in on festivals, coming of age ceremonies, and contests as she explores the different parts of the world, and as she travels about altering the maps of these lands she’ll find they’re surprisingly more connected than they seem, reminders of and connections to previous areas already evoking fond memories even though the game’s length means the last time you probably saw a specific culture might not have even been an hour ago.

Getting to know the other people of the world and checking on how they’ve come along later or changed the world since your meeting adds a bit more substance to the puzzle-solving gameplay. This isn’t just a bunch of map puzzles placed in a row, it is a way to build connections within a community and to better explore these fictional cultures that are almost all fairly well realized. The desert folk perhaps has a bit too much focus on the quest for water and the many fancy puzzles you use to solve their plight, but even when you find a family who lives atop a volcano you get a silly little tour of their attempt to host a spa up there.

 

There’s rarely any pressing danger in Carto and no enemies to be seen, so Carto ends up a mostly pleasant and relaxing experience. The music is often rather subtle and sweet, meant to evoke the mood of the current area but also adding to the game’s rather cozy feel. The character are all friendly and open to each other with little conflict and no anger to be seen, goofy characters add small moments that won’t be causing uproarious laughter but might evoke a delighted chuckle, and the hand drawn environments are all lovely looking places that can even look fairly natural after they’ve been stitched together in odd ways. While some zen games rely on the player extracting more than the experience offers, Carto feels like a better fit for a chill game to get involved in, the game delivering pleasant new scenarios and rarely getting too demanding with its puzzle design so you can keep appreciating the cast and cultures you encounter.

THE VERDICT: Carto’s map-altering puzzles start tame but soon find their footing as the game continues to concoct imaginative ways that changing the placement of land can impact the areas you explore. A few of the puzzles do seem like their exact requirements are unclear but they shouldn’t trip a player up for too long. The creative map puzzles playing into your continued exploration of new cultures really adds an extra layer to the experience, friendly peoples with new customs to share and demonstrate making continued progress more delightful in a game that really builds up a cozy low-pressure atmosphere through its look, sound, and open and amicable cast. Perhaps it could have had more wildly complex map puzzles, but the ones on offer are enjoyable, varied, and most importantly contribute to an overall pleasant aura that hangs over this lovely experience.

 

And so, I give Carto for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. Cute, calm, and charming, Carto creates a wonderful little trip around a world full of interesting invented cultures. New characters root the player into the scenario and give us good reason to interact with the customs as well as problems that only your map altering skills can solve, and you get that bittersweet joy of leaving behind old friends to go meet new ones with the promise that maybe you might get to see them again to reminisce. Carto’s the kind of gentle and cozy experience that can leave you smiling as moments both silly and sweet bring you closer into its cute but not cloyingly saccharine setting. The map puzzles definitely are the supportive framework that prevents this game from losing its energy, Carto having to whip out her map fairly often to start righting wrongs, but the boundaries of how she can move map tiles around means the action requires thought even when you’re not working with some of the more involved mechanics layered over things later. As your influence expands or new wrinkles enter how the map can be altered you still get those moments of satisfying discovery where you figure out how things need to be put together to work properly, and the moments where you’re trying to make a tile appear and it isn’t quite clicking aren’t too harmful so long as you keep a level head and do some simple shifting until it does. Some of its puzzles it keeps its hints close to its chest and others it maybe gives too much away, but even when the solution is a bit obvious it is nifty to see the outcome because piecing together the world in such a manner is made inherently interesting with how fluidly handled it is.

 

Carto never asks you to really mark the map or really get into the minutiae of editing, the tile system easy enough to understand and thus the puzzles can focus on broader ideas rather than the kind of complexities the game might have needed if it wanted to rely on pure game mechanics. However, Carto provides a pleasant adventure where places and people come together, a lovely journey through a world that is fun to edit but has plenty worth finding there already. Helping out such a nice set of characters live their unique lives without any real danger hanging over things makes Carto an easy recommendation for the kind of game to play when you want something light and low pressure, the gameplay still giving you something interesting and engaging to do even though the heartwarming interactions are the real find.