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Carto


Maryokutai
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I doubt this will be a popular topic but this game is excellent and I think more people should play it. You're playing as a little girl who got separated from her grandmother and have to find your way back to the airship they use to fly across the world. The girl (Carto) is a cartographer and can rearrange the world as she traverses it, which is the game's central mechanic and the key instrument for every puzzle you're going to encounter. At a button press the view switches to a map of your current area in which you can move and rotate different pieces of the map as you want. There's only one rule and that is that the borders of a piece must be compatible to the border of an adjacent piece (grass to grass, water to water, rock to rock and so on) but other than that you're free to do as you please and you can even move and turn the specific map piece you're currently standing on.

 

It starts off slow but quickly adds some extra layers to the mix. When an NPC asks you to find a "dense forest" early on but the only pieces you have are grasslands with some trees on one border, you can arrange those four pieces in a way to leave the middle of it blank while having the tree-borders pointing towards it, which then in turn spawns the requested forest piece in the middle. It sounds convoluted when typed out but completely makes sense in the game's logic when you play it. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

 

At 7 hours or so it has the perfect length to make as much as possible out of this idea without overstaying its welcome. The way it is focused on this singular mechanic and pushing it to its limits feels a bit similar to the equally tightly focused Portal. The overall presentation is almost unbearably cute, with tons of adorable little NPCs and animals asking for Carto's aid on her travels. I put it on my top list for 2020 and I stand by it, the reason I've only managed to finish the last three chapters now have nothing to do with its quality, but rather a bunch of real-life nonsense coming in the way.

 

PC players can try a demo on Steam btw.

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