The game music puts you in the right mood to feel loose and creative. Despite the necessary cheesiness of the art produced using the primitive artistic tools provided to the player by the game’s user interface, I found the game to be extremely relaxing as I was able to lose myself in the production of art from deep within my being. Incredibly in my time playing, Passpartout: The Starving Artist helped me get in touch with my stream of consciousness as I let my whims guide the brush to produce meaningful colors and shapes to the canvas. Once a player is satisfied with their painting, there is a button to take a screenshot of it in Steam and another button to tweet it out on Twitter for those who are so inclined. I figured I must be a natural painter born with the innate talent to produce masterpieces, so I began my next work. Surprising to me, it sold rather quickly for 127 dollars.
I titled my work and placed it out for the attention of the waiting public. I began my time playing Passpartout: The Starving Artist drawing my old favorite, a simple bunny. I assume this means that there are multiple acts and settings to play through to the game’s completion. When beginning a new game, a screen greets the player with the words Act I. This might make this the world’s first arcade painting simulation. As the title “The Starving Artist” seems to suggest, as the game mounts in challenge it may be harder to sell paintings and pay the rent. Starting with one brush, the player must paint something worthy enough to sell to her critics in order to pay her bills.
The player paints on an easel in a manner that appears similar to the Microsoft Paint user interface. In Passpartout: The Starving Artist the player plays the part of an artistic painter. It was released in 2017 for the Steam platform and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Passpartout: The Starving Artist is an artistic painter simulator with money management elements developed and published by Flamebait Games.
It almost feels like you’re being tricked into becoming artistic against your will – however, the joke’s on the developers, as you’re mainly learning how to make art that sells rather than inherently beautiful art.Passpartout: The Starving Artist Title Screen Lots of times it can feel like your art would be a lot better if you could only have a mouse.ĭespite this mobile phone frustration, Passpartout: Starving Artist manages to do what no other game has managed – actively turn players into aspiring artists through gameplay. Using your finger on your phone screen is invariably going to result in less quality, as your finger can slip far too easily. On the PC, eac drawing is made using the mouse, allowing much finer and accurate lines and colour differences, due to the more precise controls.
It won’t be long at all before you’re getting frustrated with yourself for not adding more colour variety to your older pieces, or yelling at yourself in anger at messing up a line.Ī key frustration with Passpartout is the comparison to the PC version. After about half an hour of making poor quality art a 6 year old could make, you begin to experiment with more adventurous colours, maybe even looking around to find something to inspire you.Ĭonsidering Passpartout is overtly a mish mash of an art tycoon game and a management sim, it’s surprising how much the game makes you into a proper artist. The fact that player needs to build inference from the reactions of customers to their art allows the player to learn what kind of art best sells in the community. All of this information is gleaned from their brief comments on your already created art however, not from any overt game guide. Thankfully, the gameplay is far more interesting and difficult the standard with which pedestrian customers rate your art varies massively.Īs you make your first few art pieces, there are a few different types of potential customers, grouped into what they tend to prefer – the young hippie girl seems to prefer originality and new designs, whereas the older, rather portly chaps enjoy more uniform pieces with varying colours. With a limited palette of colours, you paint your masterpiece using varying thickness of lines with your colour selection, ultimately hoping to create something that inspires the pedants walking past to hand you money.Īt first look, Passpartout must be very simple – people will want to buy your art based on some basic criteria and the game will scale the experience linearly – the more paintings you’ve made, the more money. In Passpartout: Starving Artist you draw in a similar style to MS Paint to create all the art you can imagine. Making art to fund your obsession with wine and baguettes, Passpartout: Starving Artist forces you to churn out art as quick as possible to appease the droves of art snobs that grace your garage shop front with their presence.