In chicory you fight the embodiment of self-destructive thoughts

Chicory cannot finish its job. She is an artist, and an important one at that. She is the carrier of the brush, a magical artifact that brings color to the black and white world of Picnic. But she doubts herself, her ability to paint creatively, and her worth as a brush operator. Chicory begins to paint, but erases its first strokes. She keeps starting over with no progress as the color naturally fades across the land and an impending darkness approaches. When she can’t stop what’s coming, the rabbit finally gives up. She drops the brush and locks herself in her room.

That’s where Chicory: a colorful story begins. The player character, a dog I named Oreo, is the first to find the magic brush after all the colors suddenly disappear in Picnic. Oreo is just Chicory’s caretaker, but they aspire to run the brush one day. Even though they haven’t exactly trained. Chicory is a distant friend at best, and other ambitious porters study (as we will find later) art … at an art academy. But Oreo is nothing but optimistic. They take the brush and set out to find their hero and help bring color back to the world.

In the first four chapters of the game, Oreo begins to learn some of what weighed down Chicory. The brush bearer has many responsibilities to individuals in different cities (each named after different meals). Oreo is supposed to design a new shirt for the café and paint the sky of a childhood memory. Waving the brush also brings with it greater responsibility for a community. Color matters; it contains memories and miracles. The bearer is the only person who can sustain the world as everyone knows it.

Oreo also meets previous wearers, like Chicory’s mentor Blackberry, a distant and aggressive deer. She leads Oreo early on but doesn’t help them directly. Later we find Blackberry’s mentor Cardamom, a friendly lion who tells Oreo, “If you become a wearer, you won’t draw for yourself anymore.” None of the three previous wearers still paints; they are burned out. The pain each of them felt at the end of their time seems to be in the brush.

After venturing around Picnic and unsuccessfully trying to tackle the roots of darkness, Oreo returns to the porter’s tower in the short middle chapter of the game. But something is wrong. Twisted trees invade the building, and when Oreo enters Chicory’s bedroom, they find it completely upside down. As in previous battles against the creations of darkness, white has been replaced with black, color with a luminous palette that quickly fades from the dark surface.

Oreo moves deeper frame by frame until they find chicory bent over and with visible pain. She looks tired.

Then Chicory experiences what is explicitly described by the game’s content warnings as a panic attack and verbalizes her most self-destructive thoughts as she turns inward. A poisonous color oozes from her body, the darkness materializes as color that begins to grasp and draw her in. In pain she screams: “Please forget me! I’m only making things worse … ”

The color transforms her body, taking the form of a monstrous rabbit that screams in pain before attacking. As in previous boss fights, Oreo has to dodge the oncoming attack, but when Chicory’s body emerges from the paint, Oreo doesn’t slam the opening. Instead, Oreo begs her to listen and tries to pull her mind out of a self-destructive spiral.

There are no offensive mechanics in this sequence. Rather, your player character – and chicory too – must survive until the “fight” is over. This exclusion, a restriction on the freedom of action of players and characters, represents an amazingly familiar experience of dealing with a panic attack. Sometimes you just have to hold on and do whatever you can to make it on the other end, and a friend can help you stay afloat.

The encounter ends with a deep exhalation and the two reappear outside the tower. Chicory is finally saying it to Oreo she needs them to lead the brush and promises to look after her as the correct successor. We will later learn that the rabbit’s doubts began after her mentor failed her, overwhelmed by a fear that Chicory might not be able to handle the station. Oreo knows that Blackberry was probably afraid to impose such a huge obligation on the young girl and share the pain carried by the brush, but none could express it through the pain. Chicory fled, trying to fake it on its own, just like Oreo had, and Blackberry turned to isolation in its own attempt to heal.

In all of his boss fights chicory insists that mental illness and creativity affect the world around us, and it shows how this separates characters from one another. chicory also shows that the same characters restore their relationships more strongly, together. In Chapter 5, Chicory begins to uncover the source of her pain and sets out to help the new wearer. You will help her too. At the end of chicoryWith Picnic, color is freed, relieved of cycles of past traumas and democratized. In a world where everyone can swing their own brush, Chicory and Oreo can finally paint a new future together.