And while I did need to keep a watchful eye for bullies walking the streets, who would chase after me if they spotted me, I never felt rushed in my painting of all those little or big happy trees.īut of course, as the name implies, the genies you populate the world with are the most fascinating element. It’s an oddly serene and therapeutic gameplay mechanic. But I found myself theming one wall as a sunny hillside, while the next would be a starry night bursting with life from the aurora borealis I painted. Ash needs to, essentially, literally paint the lights of his town back on, and literally drawing a line of stars across them is easy. It sounds a bit limited on paper, but every wall is a blank canvas on which to paint, and there’s just enough freedom offered in the motion controls, alongside a generous amount of paint element options that I never felt my creativity limited as I painted.
But, with responsive movement from the DualShock 4’s motion controls, you adjust the size of a sun, the slope of a hill of grass, or the angle at which the branches of a tree bend. The foundational way each element looks remains the same, so you won’t be tasked with painting every blade of grass or perfectly forming the circular shape of the sun. Players have a palette of options to pull from in Ash’s notebook, which expands as you find more pages in the world, to paint trees, stars, grass, suns, and more. Without any combat (well, until later in the game, but we’ll get to that), navigating Concrete Genie’s world is all about painting life back into Denska with Ash’s magical brush. I encountered some light platforming and collectibles meant to enhance your knowledge of the town and its current, disparaging state - but the main hook of Concrete Genie is its magical painting gameplay. How Painting and Genies Work in Concrete Genie Ash, finding his way to a rundown lighthouse in search of the scattered pages of his sketchbook, stumbles across some magically imbued pages and a paintbrush that bring his creations, the titular genies, to 2D life. Their dialogue to one another, and to Ash, quickly establishes unique personalities - clearly some of the group is not as sure-headed in their bullying as others - and relationships among one another that I hope are explored throughout the rest of that story.Īnd that story gets going quickly. The genies don’t talk, but they purr with delight when you do their bidding.Though Ash is the focus, he’s also plagued by a group of bullies, who get a small amount of screentime at the start but left a surprisingly deep impression on me. Each one is emotionally expressive, and it will tell you what it wants you to paint on its walls. When you come upon a genie image on a sidewalk, you can awaken the genie with your paintbrush. Then I finally finished it.īut the fun part is interacting with the genies, who are mischievous. I had to look at the map to figure out the lone chain of lights that I forgot to light up. It’s cute when the genies move around the corners of the buildings - an effect that art director Jeff Sangalli said was technically hard to pull off. You have to jump on dumpsters and over fences, and connect all of the lights. And Sony liked it so much that they let the team run with it.Įach building is like a puzzle. They were tossing around ideas after they shipped Entwined, and they came up with this concept of a young boy artist being bullied. They told me that the idea was born in their art department, from a visual effects artist named Ashwin Kumar. Robillard and art director Jeff Sangalli about the making of the game.
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