About midway through Chicory: A Colorful Tale, you’ll be interrupted by a group of bug messengers, requesting your presence in the underground area of Feast for their Queen Drosera. After making your way north to the city of Dinners, you will go east to the Grub Caverns — through here, you’ll make it to Feast, but not before some traversal puzzle solving.
Go down the stairs to enter the depths of Grub Caverns — after a cutscene, you’ll keep moving to the right and encounter these crab-like bugs with large cube-shaped shells. Usually, we recommend painting the entire environment to help you visually, but you’ll see that these bugs will eat any paint near them. It might seem like an annoyance at first, but how you take advantage of these bugs is the core of Grub Caverns.
You will see in the next screen that you will need to use a bug as a platform to carry you across a gap — the trick with these bugs is to draw lines from them to where you want them to go. Start painting right where they’re standing to get their attention and they will follow the line and clean up the trail, ideally ending up exactly where you want them. You can also stand on their shells while they move, so they work great as moving platforms.
This is the basis of puzzle-solving in Grub Caverns, but this section does throw some complications. Sometimes you will have to jump from bug to bug, and you will have to orchestrate situations where you can platform between them. You will also have to paint vines to swim through, usually to find better elevation to stand on a bug, but sometimes these bugs may eat that paint away, to your annoyance. Overall, discerning elevation is difficult because of the game’s art style.
Eventually, you will have to combine all of this with puzzles that involve exploding paintballs. These will be tough to finagle — in some cases, you will have to push a paintball onto a bug, and while it may not look like both of you can fit on the platform, this will work. In one screen, you are separated from a bug and a paintball on the right of some destructible rocks, and you will have to draw a line to the left in order to make the bug push the paintball to the rocks, where you can then set it to explode.
We’ve also experienced glitches where the ball stays in place even though it is seemingly on the bug platform. Just have patience and follow the above tips to get to Feast.
Published: Jun 10, 2021 04:00 pm