2021 indie hit Chicory: A Colorful Tale still packs an emotional punch 5 years later.

It’s easy to compare Chicory: A Colorful Tale, the June 2021 indie hit from developer Greg Lobanov and publisher Finnji, to a 2D Legend of Zelda title. The common ground is there: both have top-down overworlds, where you solve environmental puzzles and gradually unlock new abilities, allowing you to explore more areas of the map. Five years after its debut on PC and consoles, it’s still a joyful expression of experimental creativity.

But really, it’s more of a coloring book. Where Link might use a fire rod to light up torches in a dark cave, you’ll illuminate it with glow-in-the-dark paint. While Link needs a hookshot to clear a wide chasm, your paint triggers the trees and flowers around you to grow and change, creating new paths or launching you across a gap. While Chicory’s puzzles aren’t easy, they’re also not trying to trick you. You don’t figure out how to progress by outsmarting the map, but by exploring, painting, and seeing what happens.

Notably, there’s no combat in the game. Outside of boss battles, where you dodge projectiles while “attacking” with your paintbrush, you’ll never run into a hostile monster while exploring Chicory’s map.

Image: Wishes Ultd., Greg Lobanov, Alexis Dean-Jones, Lena Raine, Madeline Berger, A Shell in the Pit/Finji

Instead, everything comes down to a paintbrush, which your character — a cute dog named after your favorite food, the default name being “Pizza” — picks up seemingly by chance. You’re a janitor for Chicory, the brush’s true Wielder. As you clean Chicory’s tower, you find her room empty and a brush left behind. Worse yet, the whole world is devoid of color. Taking it upon yourself to color the world back in, you grab Chicory’s discarded paintbrush and set out into Picnic, the sprawling province where the game is set.

Chicory is a story about pressure. In the beginning, you get to run around, painting the world as you see fit, because you picked up the brush without any pressure or expectations. Early in the game, you stop at your sister’s Art Academy, where you’re asked to paint something that expresses joy. When the other animals in class — all with cute, food names like Quinoa and Clementine — praise your painting, it doesn’t come across as canned NPC dialogue. Your painting is just that joyful. Whether you threw some splotches on the canvas or tried to capture a photorealistic likeness of your real-life dog, the painting expresses joy because your character is earnestly joyful. Plus, you, the player, are having fun!

That low-pressure environment doesn’t hold for the game’s title character, though. Chicory is depressed; she tells you so herself. She’s overwhelmed by the weight of expectations — from her former mentor, from herself, and from the brush itself. Impostor syndrome looms large over the game. Wielding the brush, with all the baggage that comes with it, inevitably raises the question: Am I worthy? The game grapples with that question, as the Corruption, a dark manifestation of all the doubts, fears, and anxieties Wielders carry, threatens to take over a once-colorful world.

Image: Alexis Dean-Jones/Chicory Team

Since it launched five years ago, there still hasn’t been a game like Chicory. It got universal praise upon release — Polygon named it the second-best game of 2021. In 2026, it’s just as impactful. There are still very few games that handle depression and impostor syndrome as memorably and powerfully as Chicory does.

So many games are about being special: being an heir to an empire, or the strongest warrior in your nation, or some vague “chosen one.” Few games are about not being special, powerful, or chosen. Chicory isn’t about proving yourself. Instead, it proves you shouldn’t have to. You don’t have to be a brilliant artist or have great reflexes to play. Even boss fights have instant respawns and an “invincibility mode” you can toggle on. You also have the option to skip fights entirely. If you’re the kind of player who values low-stakes gameplay and a high-stakes story, Chicory is perfect for you.

It's also not a particularly long game. You can beat Chicory in 10 hours or fewer, if that’s what you want. But who speedruns a coloring book? Rushing through it robs you of the opportunity to paint the world around you, interact with the game’s vivid array of NPCs, and sit with Celeste composter Lena Raine’s gorgeous soundtrack (which just got an album of new arrangements by collective Resonant Union!). If you want the full Chicory experience, stop and smell (or paint) the flowers.

Chicory fills the same niche it did five years ago: it’s a beautiful, colorful adventure that reminds you to go easy on yourself. Whether you need a break from more overtly challenging games, prefer something more relaxing, or just really like coloring, Chicory is a game worth coming back to. You can play it on Nintendo Switch, Mac, PlayStation, Windows PC, and Xbox.

Related

A multiplayer game for friendship