TIME EXTEND
Concrete Genie
Filling in the gaps between art and puzzle design
By Christian Donlan
Developer Pixelopus Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment Format PS4 Release 2019
You’re introduced to the game in suitably creative fashion: a brush dipped in paint. You haven’t set foot in the world yet, nor moved the camera around to investigate your surroundings. Instead, you’re presented with a scrapbook of doodled monsters, all pen-and-ink affairs, just waiting to be coloured in.
It’s a wonderful initiation into Concrete Genie’s particular take on paint, thick in the centre and watery towards the edges. It’s also surprisingly hard to accurately apply with the DualShock’s gestural inputs. Or, at least, there’s a knack to it. Whether owing to a glitch in the programming or a splinter of anarchic intent in the design, the paint can shift gently on the page when you least expect it to. It feels wilful, driven by its own sense of character and its own preferences, something you must learn how to work with. That’s paint for you.
Five minutes into the game, you might find yourself feeling you could stay here painting for hours. However, Concrete Genie soon whisks the paint away and doesn’t let you touch it – at least in quite the same way – for the rest of your adventure. Sure, you arrange the general layout of any artworks by sweeping the brush over in-game surfaces with motion controls, just as you’ve learned to in this early sequence. And you often get to pick the kinds of things being painted, too – starlight here, flame over there. But, recognising you’re unlikely to be an expert draftsman, the game has its artist protagonist step in to do the actual painting for you, filling the spaces you’ve dictated with forests and butterflies and mountains and auroras. This is a game about creativity and art, then, but held suspended, at a distance.