A quandry: I like puzzle games, but I’m deeply bad at puzzles. I hit a wall with Baba Is You, an excellent word puzzle game, embarrassingly quickly. Coding puzzle game Human Resource Machine was, after around level 20, not unlike smacking my head into a computer screen repeatedly. Unfortunately, a lot of puzzle games seem to ramp up the difficulty pretty quickly, so if you hit a wall… well, you hit a wall. That might be it for you. But, if the game had a gentler incline, it might be easier to learn. Enter Carto.
In Carto, you play a young girl (named Carto) who fell from her granny’s airship and finds herself stranded on an island. She needs to find her granny, but she’s stuck in a strange land. Thankfully, she has a talent for maps. Specifically, she can manipulate maps of areas to reorient the geography to her whim, allowing her to traverse a series of islands to find her way home.
“You never seem to get lost.”
There are different kinds of puzzle games. Two I mentioned above, Baba Is You and Human Resource Machine, test your logic skills. Can you create a logically consistent statement that executes in the manner you desire with extremely limited tools? If you haven’t trained yourself in formal logic, you might find that you struggle with them.
Carto is a different kind of puzzle game, focusing on spatial reasoning and creativity. You have the ability to move map tiles around. That is really the only verb you have in the game. So, to spoil an early puzzle, you might meet a guy who offers to help you, but is looking for his home. All he remembers is that it was to the west of the fisherman’s hut. Pick up the map piece you’re already on and move it to the west of the fisherman’s hut and, poof, you’ve found his home! The entire game uses that single mechanic, but the puzzles increase in complexity and creativity quickly.
If I have a complaint, it is that there are time when you will figure out a puzzle quicker than the game intends, and the game won’t let you solve it until you’ve triggered the puzzle’s start. For instance, I got caught in one puzzle because I was doing the right thing (matching a specific feature of the landscape to create an image) but the game didn’t recognize what I was doing because I hadn’t talked to the person who would explain why I had to do that. It makes sense both as a storytelling tool and as a way of preventing accidental solutions, but it can be frustrating.
“I didn’t expect to see you again, small one.”
The map tiles are small but evocative. If you have a prairie piece and a lake piece, you can’t just set them next to each other; the water would have nowhere to go. You need a shoreline, and you need that shoreline to attach to the prairie. Because the game’s core puzzles revolve around manipulating these small tiles, it is important that they be easy to ‘read’ at a glance.
Consequently, the game smartly keeps its biomes pretty limited. You don’t need to worry about matching landscape features beyond broad categories: Woods, water, mountains, etc…. This cuts down on clutter while offering hints at puzzles based on what the game deems important enough to place on a tile. Because the game’s puzzles are so based on spatial reasoning, this is a clever way to signal important information. Oftentimes, you need to physically explore a map to reveal those important markers, which rewards you for exploration without punishing you for being unable to tell what is simply an interesting feature and what is vital to a puzzle.
Carto‘s overworld style and writing are equally charming. The game’s characters are mostly simple, one-dimensional people who exist to give the world some a sense of humor and set up puzzles to play with to a soothing soundtrack. But Carto is surprisingly nuanced when it wants to be. Shiannon, a semi-companion you meet early in the game, has an emotional story arc of her own that works shockingly well, particularly if you use your time in the Story Chalet puzzles to read about the world. There you learn something genuinely sweet yet heartbreaking about Shiannon’s people that suggests a world that was built with more care and depth than I had expected.
“I’m just not ready to leave.”
The game is also expertly ported to the Switch, which is how I played. Unlike, say, John Wick Hex, I never had any issue with crashing or bugs. The clean, evocative art made it easy to see the small tiles and solve puzzles, even in handheld mode. And, it turned out to be an excellent game to play in short bursts, on a lunch break or waiting for a meeting to begin.
Unfortunately, it is a pretty short game. I finished Carto in under five hours. Unlike with Baba Is You or Human Resource Machine, there’s really only one solution to most puzzles, and there didn’t appear to be a lot of hidden content. It’s hard to say how much replayability there is right off the bat. But does that matter? For some people, the price will be high for such a short game; for me, having a fun, inventive puzzle game I could engage with in short chunks was what I needed.
Because ultimately Carto is a first and foremost a relaxing game, a peaceful experience that helped destress before bed when my brain was moving too fast to read. With phenomenal art design, solid writing, and a good set of puzzles for players of all ages, Carto is a slight but winning. I wish more puzzle games took the time Carto does to craft an engaging world beyond the set of puzzles, and to more gently ramp up the difficulty. And, on the flip-side, I wish Carto was as flexible and inventive with its core concept as something like Baba Is You. Between those two is maybe the perfect puzzle game for me. But for now, I’ll enjoy what I have in Carto, a soothing video game for a few long winter nights.
