Chico and the Magic Orchards DX

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

While I was playing Chico and the Magic Orchards DX, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Mole Mania. The two games share superficial similarities, as Mole Mania was a family-friendly Game Boy character-based Top-Down Puzzle game about a small mammal and Chico and the Magic Orchards, released on PC in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023, is stylized like a Game Boy or Game Boy Color game (depending on the options you select), and is also a family-friendly character-based Top-Down puzzle game about a small mammal. However, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Like Mole Mania, it’s tempting to draw comparisons here to Zelda (and particularly to The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening) due to the Top-Down view, the appealingly quaint art style, the sometimes not strictly linear levels, and the puzzle design. However, Chico is its own thing, taking similar game mechanics and using those to build some clever puzzles around one central gameplay element.

While Mole Mania was about digging holes between underground and over-ground layers, Chico is all about lugging around a big, heavy walnut. See, while Chico the squirrel is versatile and can jump, push wall buttons, and interact with the environment in a few other ways, he doesn’t have the weight needed to press down floor buttons. To do so, he’ll need to make use of said walnut, though it can’t always follow where he goes (being unable to jump), and he can’t always follow where he’s able to fling or ricochet the walnut (for example, over spikes).

It’s a simple premise, but Chico and the Magic Orchards DX manages to keep finding new and clever ways to make use of that premise, with some extremely creative level design and boss design. This was also a reason this game reminded me of Mole Mania – despite not being a part of a major Nintendo franchise, this game has Nintendo’s design sensibilities all over it. And Chico and the Magic Orchards wasn’t even created by a major established developer!

The presentation is another excellent contributing factor here. The Game Boy-styled 2D pixel art visuals are delightful and nostalgic in all the right ways, absolutely exuding charm, with a pleasant chiptune soundtrack to match. I could easily see a game just like this releasing on the Game Boy Color, and if it were it’s almost certain it would have become a cult classic.

If I had to point to one flaw in this game, it’s the controls. Chico controls a bit too loosely, which can make the tricky top-down platforming sections overly-difficult. It’s a shame too, because in just about every other way this game seems extraordinarily polished.

However, despite irritating control issues, I found Chico and the Magic Orchards DX to be an absolute delight, and well worth seeking out for fans of character-based Puzzle games and especially fans of retro-styled games. And if there are any Mole Mania fans out there… look, yes, this game doesn’t play quite like Mole Mania, but I still feel like there are some lovely parallels between the two, and hopefully you’ll be able to appreciate Chico and the Magic Orchards DX for those.

tl;dr – Chico and the Magic Orchards DX is a family-friendly character-based Top-Down puzzle game stylized to look like a Game Boy Color game, where players take the role of a squirrel solving puzzles by pushing around a walnut. The puzzle design and boss design here is phenomenal, and the presentation is pitch-perfect to capture nostalgia. And while there are some irritating control issues, overall this game is an absolute winner, well worth playing.

Grade: B+

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