Carto Switch Review – Shaping the World

Carto is a sweet little puzzle game about a young girl, named Carto, with a map that can reshape the world around her. The game begins with Carto on an airship with her Granny, playing with the magic map. When Granny falls asleep, Carto accidentally connects their airship with a terrible storm, throwing her overboard with only the map in her possession. You arrive on a small island, where you will learn how to use the map and then begin your adventure.

The ways of the map are simple to learn, but they’re reused in so many different ways the game stays fresh from start to finish. Map pieces can be given to you as rewards for helping people, completing puzzles, or they can just be lying around on the floor. There are also six secret map pieces to look out for. Once you have a piece you can press X to look at your whole map, and put your new piece down.

Pieces can only be placed next to other pieces with the same border. For example, if you have a piece with a forest on it, you can’t have it next to a grassland piece. This takes a little getting used to, but if it wasn’t there then the game would be too easy! Once you place a map piece, it’s not there to stay. You’ll find yourself constantly shifting and rotating things to navigate through this adorable little world. Once you finish a chapter and go on to a new one, your old map pieces will be left behind, so the map screen doesn’t get cluttered.

The story of Carto is an adorable and wholesome one that I absolutely loved experiencing. On your quest to find your granny again, you’ll explore multiple different worlds and help out the characters who live there. Although the whole mechanic with the map is what allows Carto to stand out from a huge crowd of games, the characters are what kept me really engaged. The adorable watercolour designs make it feel as if you are inside a kids’ picture book, and the stories and quests are heartwarming and cute.

Whether helping a shepherd find his lost sheep, searching for a water source deep in the desert, discovering a mysterious iceberg, or just entering a local fishing competition, I was always more than happy to help out. There weren’t too many puzzles that just relied on you looking for something and bringing it back to whoever wanted it, which I personally think is quite an overused quest type in games.

Something I would suggest for Carto is maybe adding an objective log of some kind. That way it would be easy to tell what you were supposed to be doing, as sometimes the characters won’t remind you if you go and talk to them again.

The objectives could just be short and simple, such as “explore the world” or “retrieve this item for this person”. I also had a few problems with saving. There’s a little pop up menu that allows you to “save and quit to title”, but sometimes when I clicked this button, it just didn’t save. That got annoying, as I’m sure you can imagine.

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Carto is a game I think everyone should be playing. The music is simple and incredibly relaxing, the characters are friendly, and the adorable comic book style cutscenes help fill in the spaces between chapters. The puzzle mechanic is incredibly clever and a lot of fun to play with.

However, do not be fooled by Carto’s simple appearance. This game is deceptively challenging, and I found myself having to use a lot of help to get through some of the chapters. Despite the occasional frustrations with saving and forgetting what I was doing between plays, the game ran very smoothly and I really enjoyed the experience the whole way through.

Carto review provided by Nintendo Link
Developer: Sunhead Games
Publisher: Humble Games
Release Date: 27 October, 2020
Price: $19.99
Game Size: 2.8GB