Carto on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information

Carto is a charming adventure game wrapped around a unique, world-altering puzzle mechanic. Use this power to explore mysterious lands, help a quirky cast of characters, and guide Carto on her journey back to her family.

Carto is a indie, cute and puzzle game developed by Sunhead Games and published by Humble Games and XD.
Released on October 27th 2020 is available on Windows and MacOS in 9 languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish - Latin America, French and German.

It has received 8,446 reviews of which 8,157 were positive and 289 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.4 out of 10. 😍

The game is currently priced at 19.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 2.88€ on Instant Gaming.

The Steam community has classified Carto into these genres:

Indie Cute Puzzle Exploration Hand-drawn Relaxing Adventure Story Rich Female Protagonist Singleplayer Colorful Atmospheric Family Friendly Nature 2D Stylized Funny Top-Down Cartoon Open World

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at Carto through various videos and screenshots.

System requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS *: Windows 7 SP1+
Processor: Intel or AMD Dual Core at 2 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce 9600 GS, Radeon HD 5670
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 2 GB available space

MacOS

OS: macOS 10.11+
Processor: Intel or AMD Dual Core at 2 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce 9600 GS, Radeon HD 5670
Storage: 2 GB available space

User reviews & Ratings

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Dec. 2024

I really enjoyed the puzzle nature of this game. It was simple at times, but also nicely challenging at other times. The stories through out were very nice and interesting to discover. I wish that the map puzzles had a more cohesiveness to them, that there was a solid map at the end of it all, but I think that is just the type-A personality in me. Overall, this was a very fun game to play.

Aug. 2024

I absolutely loved this game! It goes beyond its brilliant concept—a blend of Zelda where the map itself is a puzzle you piece together to progress—with a very cute but rich story, endearing characters and stunning visuals! Yet another indie gem just waiting to be discovered!

July 2024

Sights & Sounds - It's really hard not to gush over the gorgeous storybook visuals. Given the prominence of books and paper in many central story and gameplay elements, it makes a lot of sense to adopt the style of another printed medium. It admittedly would have been interesting to see what it would look like if everything had a cartographic style, but that would have robbed the visuals of their color and cuteness - I'm a little split on how I feel about every edge being kinda squiggly, but it wasn't bothersome enough to really matter. It enhances the "softness" of the character and environment designs, at least - While not universally true, I almost always expect a fairly chill and relaxed soundtrack in a puzzle game. Carto's music offers no surprises in terms of mood in that regard. It's still an interesting set of songs, though. What really struck me, if you'll pardon the pun, was the impressive diversity in percussion. Drums, chimes, maracas, triangles, tamborine, either a xylophone or marimba (both?), and perhaps even a glockenspiel get layered into some really complex rhythms. Sure, there's a healthy dose of woodwinds, strings, and synth, but the tracks that got me tapping my feet were the ones where the percussion section was going wild Story & Vibes - The plot follows Carto, a little girl who travels the skies making maps with her grandmother in their airship. But they're no ordinary maps; these are collected in a magical atlas. They have the power to combine, divide, and shuffle the world itself by reorganizing map pieces - Being that Carto is a curious little girl, she wants to try it out for herself. For reasons unknown, she combines a thundercloud piece with a piece containing their airship, resulting in Carto falling from the sky with the atlas. Unfortunately, scraps of paper are torn from the atlas and carried all over the world by the storm's winds - The narrative takes form as Carto tries to make the atlas whole again, meets a wide range of colorful characters in need of help, and attempts to track down her grandmother - It's a very cute story, and it's pretty much devoid of bad vibes outside of the conflict that's set up in the initial cutscene. That's not necessarily a bad thing for a puzzle game, but it does make the plot less engrossing. Instead, most beats are fairly chill and positive, centering around helping people. The absence of intrigue takes a lot of "spice" out of the game Playability & Replayability - If you read the plot description, you may have already correctly inferred that Carto's primary puzzle dynamic involves arranging map pieces on the grid to reshape the world. Sometimes, you'll need to listen to characters who point out specific landmarks in cardinal directions relative to each other in order to make a location or person appear. Other times, you'll have to arrange pieces in a certain way to reveal new sections of the map (e.g., lining up two broken bridge pieces to make a bridge piece appear between them) - As the map pieces are almost always 1x1 squares, the main restriction on placement is the geography of each side. Mountains must touch mountains, water must touch water, plains must touch plains, etc. Any side is allowed to be unconnected to anything - This changes in the game's final section, where pièces become, for a lack of a better term, "Tetris-y". This ramps up the difficulty a touch and makes the puzzles more interesting - That last bullet belies my primary complaint about Carto: it's really easy. There are, of course, a few clever puzzles (the Library section was by far my favorite), but I was able to autopilot large portions of this game. I like the feeling of "eureka" moments after I've been stumped by a devious puzzle for a while, and Carto simply couldn't muster the difficulty necessary to provide those Overall Impressions & Performance - Carto is a game of soft edges, literally and figuratively. In the context of the audiovisual design, this works fairly well, but the plot and gameplay suffer from an overly gentle approach. These qualities certainly make Carto a more relaxing experience, but also a less enticing one - It ran well and looked nice on the Steam Deck Final Verdict - 6/10 . While Carto promises an extremely cute and eminently chill playthrough, don't go in expecting much challenge or excitement. It's probably a better game for those who go in with a better mindset than I did, but I was left wanting a bit more at almost every turn

July 2024

Relaxing puzzle game with beautiful artwork and a warm story. The puzzles were quite straightforward, and it didn't require a lot of looking for hidden things unless you were looking for secrets and all the hidden achievements.

June 2024

I really wanted to love Carto. It has such a gorgeous art style and the story is charming and wholesome. I loved the first half, and would have had nothing but glowing words for it if it has continued to the same standard. Overall, it's a very enjoyable game, but it feels dashed off towards the end. The quality of both the puzzles and writing declines as you go through the game. In contrast to the first half - which really shines with making the way forward intuitive and nicely flowing - the latter half has a few times where the ability to progress is gated behind a conversation that the game doesn't give the player any indication is the likely next step. The return to the island, especially, has one where you have to go to leave the island before you're allowed to complete the cartography puzzle, very strange. The big negative for me though is the hidden achievements, some of which require you to play through a significant chunk of the game again just to trigger a tiny interaction. That kind of this is really annoying, especially with a story based game like this that has almost no replayability; not that it should, just realise that your players will not want to sit through the same unskippable conversations again. It really soured an otherwise excellent game for me.

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Last Updates

Steam data	11 April 2025 08:19
SteamSpy data	09 April 2025 15:16
Steam price	13 April 2025 12:25
Steam reviews	13 April 2025 04:04

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