Highlights
- Calico continues to grow and evolve with updates and a new release on Sony's PlayStation consoles, providing an endless world of creativity and friendship.
- The game focuses on customization, with a diverse character creator and the ability to apply patterns to clothing. The recent Pawsome Edition update added new animals and bug fixes, improving the game's reception.
- Peachy Keen Games has plans for more fun content updates for Calico, like a new character, and is considering making new games set in Calico's universe.
In the years since its initial release, 2020 cat cafe sim Calico has continued to grow and evolve, first through its 2022 Pawsome Edition free update and now by releasing on Sony’s Playstation 4 and 5 consoles. But the cozy world of magical girls and cats so reminiscent of Animal Crossing continues to grow and evolve.
In Calico, players take control of a cat cafe. From cooking, to befriending animals, to exploring the local fashion trends, players can make their mark on their cafe while fulfilling quests from NPCs around town. Reaching the credits of a game like Calico isn’t really the end of the game, explains Kells, founder of Calico developer Peachy Keen Games during an interview with Game ZXC. Rather, it is just one accomplishment in an endless world of creativity and friendship.
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As the PlayStation release was going live, Kells talked to Game ZXC about the road to this point in Calico’s life, and what remains on the horizon. Peachy Keen has even more interesting plans for Calico’s future as it continues to expand on the options available to players already in the life simulator. Those plans may even involve entirely new games set in Calico’s world.
We have lots of plans! We’re very attached to the universe of Calico . We’re in the process of making more fun content updates for Calico , and planning out what games we want to make in the future set in the Calico universe.
Concretely, Kells mentioned several characters that didn’t make it into the final game, at least one of whom Peachy Keen is presently working on implementing. She also mentioned wanting to implement other genres of fashion into the game at some point in the near future, further expanding on the ability to customize players’ characters.
That customization has been a major focus of Calico’s development, she explained. The character creator goes beyond what Kells sees as more standard body shape options by making sure larger bodies weren’t just stretched versions of skinnier ones, and ensuring the game had a variety of skin tones. Moreover, Kells said the game’s technical director, Andrew Bowie, implemented a system to allow players to apply patterns to clothing.
That will be far from the first major update to Calico. In 2022, Peachy Keen released a free update to the game’s 2.0 build called the Pawsome Edition. That came with scaling rewards for the various minigames players can undertake, as well as dozens of new cooking minigames. Of course, the Pawsome update also added new animals to befriend, and was able to reuse some animations to get more animals implemented.
We basically just added all our favorite animals. The first ones I put in were cats, an Australian shepherd (my favorite dog breed), a red panda, and a raccoon. One restriction we had though was that we only had a certain range of rigs and animations. For example, the cow and goat are using the deer animations, and the ferret is a long raccoon rig! A lot of the animals are also from Kickstarter backers, which was very fun to put into the game.
The Pawsome update also came with a slate of bugfixes that helped improve the game’s reception. Kells has, overall, been satisfied with how people have responded to Calico and the wide range of people who have picked the cozy title up.
We’ve been really excited to see so many people enjoying it, and seeing the same joy in it that we see! What’s been interesting is the spread of types of gamers who enjoy it. The low difficulty of the game means we’ve seen kids as young as six enjoy it , which is adorable to see. We initially had a lot of feedback about bugs to fix and more content to add, which we’ve been consistently fixing and adding since launch.
As for what will come next in the world of Calico, Kells didn’t offer any hints but made it clear that Peachy Keen is sticking with the pastel world of magical girls and adorable animals for some time.
Calico is out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
