As fundamental as that approach is to Concrete Genie’s underlying philosophy, it’s also by far the biggest stumbling block in building out the core ideas into a compelling game. Outside of a handful of more guided painting segments, there’s no reason (beyond simple aesthetics) that you can’t quickly paint the same object over and over again instead of taking minutes to lovingly craft a scene. It only cares that you’re painting something. Lovecraft.īut the game isn’t interested in evaluating your art. This is doubly true of the genies-in the absence of any real limits, I found myself accidentally making creatures that were less Maurice Sendak and more H.P. It’s also easy to go overboard, and make a jumbled, nonsensical mess that no human being could possibly enjoy looking at. With a little practice, it’s easy to create attractive landscapes full of rich detail far beyond your actual artistic ability. ![]() Suns and moons extend outward from the center of your cursor to a maximum size. Plants have a maximum length, and the ground will rise up to meet their base. Stars and auroras, for instance, will streak across the wall indefinitely. The various (non-genie) designs behave differently, but all in a way that feels intuitive and reasonable. ![]() (The default uses the DualShock 4’s motion controls, but you can also swap to the right stick if you’re more comfortable with that.) All you do is press R2 to switch into painting mode, select the object you’d like to paint from a menu, point your cursor at the wall, hold down R2, and then move the cursor to paint. Painting designs and genies is fairly intuitive no matter which control scheme you choose. They’re functionally just there to be cute and flip switches to help you advance. The three types-red for fire, yellow for electricity, and blue for wind-are all predetermined by location and have a single ability totally unrelated to whatever design you cook up. After you bring them to life picking between body types and attachments like horns and tails, the genies rove around on walls and help out with light puzzle solving. At specific locations, Ash can also paint and bring to life cartoon monsters-the eponymous genies, who do not appear to have anything at all in common with their mythological counterparts. To unlock new designs, he’ll need to track down the lost pages from his notebook. To make a long, hand-waving story much shorter, some local bullies rip the pages from Ash’s sketchbook, and he soon finds himself in possession of a magical paintbrush that lets him adorn every wall he encounters with glowing technicolor art. Playing as Ash, a young boy with a passion for sketching and painting, you’re tasked with bringing color and hope back to the abandoned fishing village of Denska, which has collapsed in the wake of an environmental catastrophe and now finds itself overrun with “darkness,” a black-and-purple mixture of goo and thorny tendrils symbolizing, and perhaps literally caused by, the negative emotions of the town’s former inhabitants. ![]() This is a game about art, but the most idealized, big-tent, Bob Ross version of the idea-an art that everyone can and should make and enjoy, free of judgment or critique. A lemming, too.Īll that is to say I found Concrete Genie, the new PlayStation 4 exclusive from Pixelopus, refreshingly naive in its approach to art. Mostly, I suspect, I’m blindly following the lead of some art world gatekeeper I’ve never even heard of. I’m sure I could dredge up some Barthes or something from my college days, but I’m not sure I really feel any of that. I can’t explain how Damien Hirst can bedazzle a skull or put a shark in formaldehyde and make millions while brilliant figurative painters are stuck exchanging their work for Reddit karma. I can’t tell you why Andy Warhol was a genius for creating images designed to be reproduced in bulk but Thomas Kinkade was a hack for doing the same. What I mean is that I don’t really grasp the underlying philosophy of the art world. I don’t just mean that I draw or paint on the level of a fourth grader-though that’s certainly true. When it comes to the visual arts, I’m an idiot.
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