Carto - Developed by Sunhead Games and published by Humble Games
Carto is one of those games you can easily breeze through in an afternoon and provides a nice relaxing aside from mainstream titles. It is a very low-key puzzle game, based on the adventures of a young girl named Carto that gets separated from her grandmother. Carto is left with a magic world map, which is missing many of its pieces, but as Carto travels, she finds pieces that adds to the map, letting her explore further. This process allows you to pick up, move, and rotate the tiles of the map to relocate them anywhere as long as features match up on the sides (forest to forest, water to water, and so forth). This may be needed just to navigate to specific landmarks, but more often, you are to solve puzzles by talking to the game's colorful NPCs who will hint at what you need to do.
An early puzzle is based on one figure instructing you to find a certain character in the island's large forest, which translates to moving all of the tiles with forest parts to be contingious, which will cause that character to appear. Later puzzles continue this tile-world aspect well, such as one world where you must look for visual clues for how to place tiles as to proceed through a proverbal maze, and another world where there are top and bottom layers to each tile, but you cannot move the tiles while in the bottom layers, and thus need to recall their layout when manipulating them from the top layer. None of the puzzles are difficult, some edging on being overtly obvious. Only a few late game puzzles felt they were more random guessing of how to match tiles up to progress, but as there is no penalty for mistakes, this was just trial and error to get the right answer.
The game is rounded off by a nice watercolor-like art style that matches the light tone of the story. There is nothing too dramatic here, just a decent set of characters that are generally well-written to help support the game, and with a few amusing lines throughout. It does feel that this would be a excellent game to be played with younger players/children given the game's lead character. It is not overly challenging, though there are a few secret puzzles that you can come back to via chapter select to try to find and solve. It doesn't break new ground too much, but does an excellent job of offering a game designed puzzles and a tile-based world, and does it well without dragging on too long. Its pricetag may be its only major strike, since this does not feel as extensive as other $20 games, though its not far off.
Carto is available on PC (Steam, Epic Games, and Humble, as well as on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Switch. It is currently available via the Xbox Game Pass as well.
