izigame.me

I recommend this, but with *extreme reservation*. The game is exactly what you see in the previews and little more. It feels like someone's first videogame, a game that one of your friends could have made.
Calico is a game with a lot of fun ideas and style with shortcomings that ultimately leave one wanting more. Sadly my hopes are not exceedingly high we will be getting more, as their last big update came out 2 years ago.
My first and biggest complaint is that *there is no way to expand or upgrade your cafe*. It seems like that should have been a natural first choice for game progression: unlocking more cases for more baked goods, a larger space for more seating, and most importantly *room for every cat you meet to come live at the cafe*. There are like, 20 cats in this game, and so many other animals too, but you can only keep 10 in the cafe at a time? This seems like an extreme oversight in game design that could have elevated this to the next level.
Most other parts of the game seem based off of this missing concept: why give us more than one display case if all cases display the same 6 goods? Why give us so many pieces of furniture as quest rewards if you run out of meaningful places to put them?
My second complaint is there is no indication that an NPC has a quest ready, other than you traversing the map to talk to them. No quest markers. No fast travel. This is Game Design 101, people.
There is very little to the "sim" aspect of it as well. The NPCs have favorite treats but you never get a sense of knowing who is coming in and when. You gain hearts with them? But there is no progression of the relationship from it. No romance options.
And my last complaint is the cooking minigames. I like that they are trying something different. But I feel like there should be a skill tree that helps you score higher in the games. (And the one that makes you play pool is just bad. Don't make a badly-working pool game and give *me* a low score for not being able to play it.)
There is something to love here. I had fun with the design of the cats and other animals, the character creator has some great stylistic options, and your eventual unlocking of travel by bird is very satisfying. It just needs to cover more of the basics and get some "serious" polish before I would recommend it to anyone else.
Even though $12 doesn't seem like much for the game to begin with, I would still highly recommend waiting for a sale - somewhere between $5-8 seems more fitting.

This game looked cute, and the thought of managing a cat cafe sounded fun. Seemed like a casual, fun game.
However, it is very lacking and a disappointment. Cuteness is all it has going for it, and then nothing else. There is not any substance to the game. Really, all this game is a animal collector pretending to have a story and cafe management.
You're not even managing the cafe all that much. The mayor mentions that you'd have to build it up but there's not really anything to build, if anything it's in weirdly fantastic shape with the way it's implied it's been shut down for a few years. Sure, you have to run around and purchase or otherwise be given different recipes, and sometimes you have to remake them when they go stale, but otherwise nothing really matters. As others have said, the baking minigame is really just annoying and kind of grating after the first few times, and I had a controller so it was an easier time, but truly, there is like no way to get a gold star on any of these given the platforming mechanics and the elevator are just too slow. Once you meet someone, they just show up to your cafe whether you're there or not, purchasing something and then leaving after a set amount of time. No budgeting to purchase ingredients, you're not able to upgrade anything about the cafe, you're stuck with 6 display items no matter how many cases you purchase. You're not even doing much of anything with the furniture or animals because there's only two quests where someone even adopts an animal and I've honestly just grabbed both from outside and handed it to them. Really, all money does is allows you to purchase cosmetics and the few recipes you don't get doing any of the fetch quests. Honestly, if this wasn't advertised as a cafe management type game it would probably be less disappointing.
I was surprised to finish the main "story" under 5 hours, and I wasn't even really rushing at all to do it. The story is really just "oh no, all these areas are blocked off, go clear them by doing endless fetch quests and talking to people" which, like. ok. This isn't really all that fun, all things considered. Lots of wasted opportunity for little minigames for quests, especially for the magic ones, but the characters just talk at you. The characters are cute. There sure is a faint whiff of worldbuilding here, and it's... eh?, the best way I can describe it. "Teehee, everything is magic" like i guess so. Kinda wish there was a bit more. Or even much actual choices besides starting furniture, dance moves, and whether or not to invest in different cat businesses, which honestly seems pointless not to since you just are drowning in money the entire time. Like, what was up with those city cats anyway? We'll never know, just city cats are bipedal and only like 6 of them speak human, but only once.
The extra time on my playthrough was me attempting to get all the achievements and then immediately realized the tedium of trying to find and pick up all the animals in the game, so I settled for recipes and quests and then quitting. It is truly a very empty game.
This is also just a general annoyance and nitpicky, but while it is nice to have the character be fat (oh sorry, "fluffy" - calling it this makes it slightly more annoying imo, but sure, whatever, it's there at least) there is no way to just not have an hourglass figure. Like if you wanted to have a girl main character just do that. The facial hair options are kinda nice but you're out of luck if you wanted to not have visible curves, and also they just look bizarre at certain max slider ranges. Customizing colors is also a pain on the controller, and there's not really a way to save any colors (or if there is it's hidden or so obtuse my brain forgot it on purpose). The gradients just don't look very good after lots of fiddling, tho that's probably on me for trying to do gradients so much. They only really work on the long tails and your shirts.
I got this on sale for very cheap, but honestly I don't think it was really worth it for me personally. If you want to kill five-ish hours or are more motivated than me to 100% the animal collection, then go for it, but I wouldn't pay full price for this. I would listen to the people complaining about the cooking minigames in this animal showcase being an utter nightmare on keyboard and mouse, because controller was only marginally better. Really what killed this was the advertisement as a cafe management sim for me. I'm a fan of restaurant sims and this was really a collect animals and do fetch quests simulator, which is not anywhere close to being the same. The customization was merely ok to a little annoying to navigate on the controller.

Firstly, I ADORE calico cats <3
Calico is a really chill, unique and aesthetic world to explore. It's a safe haven, inclusive and LGBTQIA+ positive <3 The world is much more detailed and story-rich than it looks in the preview and I highly recommend!
The start was a little slow and I wasn't too impressed with the customization tools. They're altogether very clunky (maybe my controller isn't optimal). There could be more styles in both character customization and furniture. I thought I'd find really nice skirts and dresses like the denizens have. By the time I got just a normal skirt, the game was nearly completed, so that was quite the bummer.
One thing that did stand out from the characters' dialogue a bit was a grinding work culture mindset, which I don't really think should be brought up in a supposed-to-be relaxing game.
I was also slightly concerned about the quality of dialogue and grammar at the start of the game, which wasn't very promising. But it's a heartwarming story, that gets better and more engaging.
The denizens could have more dialogue even if there are no quests atm (esp late game).
Glitches are quite common at times and get bothersome when editing your café and yard (with pets in party / yard).
I LOVED the baking aspect of the game, which was unexpected and fun!
There was no incentive to bake many recipes or to decorate your home the way you like, bc it got cluttered with things you had to buy and place. The controls for removing and placing things were not intuitive.
The game is much longer than I expected and has clear quests, which are easy to accomplish. Getting to credits took me about 16h, but you can continue playing and there are still some things to do after that.
The game is also way too short and I would love to keep playing and finding more characters, stories, secrets and new areas. I don't think that will happen 'though, since it's from 2020 and there haven't been any updates lately.
After the quests are completed, there isn't as much to do, other than customizing your cat café, character and playing around with your potions and pets.
I'm still looking for potential secrets and hoping there will be updates to this game ;-; I would like to know more about Oliver (the cat) and dress my character in cute flower and dessert outfits, especially dresses and skirts.
I'm also looking forward to the games the developers come up with next.
I was looking for cute and relaxing games. I think this was just that!
Cute 4.5/5
Relaxing 4/5