Like the other negative reviews of this game, I feel that the main problem with this game is balance. I'd even call it unfinished. There are surprisingly basic fonts used, and 1990s-lookin UI elements that don't contribute to the mood or theme that the game is trying to present that feel like placeholders. The pictures you can create are all over the place in terms of theme, from anime and music video screenshots, to professional photos like the Windows XP desktop hill-with-clouds.
Dubious licensing aside, (I couldn't find a credits page) there are far too FEW images as well, for how many a player is expected to 'paint' in any given run. Also, no capability to add one's own images, which feels like a rudimentary capability of the software that could have been implemented. Heck, to better monetize this game, THAT feature could have been a paid upgrade!
This is a clicker game, where early stages can be automated and sped up, and rounds of progression resets it, with bonuses to make the next round faster. There is an always-on-idler aspect as well, no offline progression, demanding large numbers of hours be spent with the game simply running on your device to accumulate resources. The problem is, the implementation here is unbalanced. Resetting removes FAR too much progress, and upgrades do not persist.
The usual pattern of upgrade-cycle games like this is 3 steps forward, then reset takes you 2 steps back and gives you a speed boost. You might make it to step 6 next time, and the next reset takes you only 2 steps back, so you retain MORE progression than you had, when restarting the first time. THIS game does 3 steps forward, 3 steps back, requiring the player to pass step 1 and 2 again BEFORE giving them a speed boost. In this second round, the player reaches step 4, and upon reset, goes 4 steps back, having to play steps 1 and 2 exactly like the first two times they did so. So when they get the speed boosts back, it doesn't feel like any progress was really made? There aren't that MANY things to upgrade, either, and pricing goes absolutely bonkers after a while, like the numbers were indiscriminately just multiplied by 2 each time, and not play-tested for smoothness of progression at all.
This causes some ludo-narrative dissonance in that, it seems like the painter we are playing as, keeps somehow FORGETTING everything we learned! Sure, the game contextualizes the loss of the money resource by saying, you moved to a new city, start over! But this framing frustratingly does not explain why that would cause an artist to lose all their self-knowledge about how to work efficiently! But I'm willing to overlook that for the sake of gameplay - which isn't ALL bad.
Having to get 'inspiration' back by taking a vacation is a fairly good IDEA, but there's no time spent on that idea in-game, no unique cutscene imagery. The player just immediately trades money for inspiration points, and gets right back to work, which feels more cynically capitalist than I think the dev intended. Further, with the unfortunate repeats of images, sometimes it can cost 10 or 100 times the inspiration points to redo an exactly similar image from 2 hours ago, which is too much ludo-narrative dissonance to tolerate. If the early game images were fairly simple pixel art that gave less money, but were finished sooner, and the later game images had MORE pixels and layers of detail and rounds of polishing before being presentable, that would make SENSE. But that would have required more effort on the part of the developer, who didn't come back to tinker with this game after its release, and simply moved on to other projects.
TL;DR - this game feels a bit hollow. Unpolished, unloved. This was not a passion project, and it shows. It's like going to a dance in an outfit without accessories - it's serviceable, it's FINE. It's just also obvious that this isn't what the dev wanted to be doing with their time. But it IS a solid base for something that could have been pleasant, even beloved, if it had gotten more attention. Who knows, this might inspire you the player to get into modding, to build something that takes this game those last few steps into the realm of actually being satisfying or fun!
At least it was free. I got maybe 10, 20 hours of enjoyment out of it? Whereas all-achievements players have reported spending 2000 plus. That tells me, with my 60 hours of playtime at time of review, that it's probably better to just stop now.
