A group of bullies steals his book and rips out the pages, forcing Ash to go on a quest to retrieve them all. I’d even wish for one, if the genies would let me.Ĭoncrete Genie is out now for PlayStation 4.Welcome to the Concrete Genie Trophy Guide! In Concrete Genie you play as Ash, a young boy with the passion of doodling in his sketchbook. The price tag gives a little cover to these issues, but I’d be happy with a longer, better game even if it was more expensive. Is this nitpicky? Sure, but a lack of polish hurts some wonderful and creative gameplay elsewhere in Concrete Genie. Just mash jump and he makes it, regardless of visual momentum. For example, you swing monkey bars-style from a lot of pipes but theres no to-and-fro motion of any consequence. Falling is hard anyway, because Ash seems to operate on autopilot. Fall too far, you go back to where you were. Animations will clip in weird ways, and there’s no physics or fail states to anything. In addition to its brevity, Concrete Genie has hollow platforming. There’s also a PSVR feature I didn’t test.īack to that $30. There’s a free paint mode and a post-campaign mode that let you go full Picasso, inviting replays. Clearly, we’re meant to paint and paint and paint. Start to finish it took me about six hours, and that includes a little extra time painting. The levels are small and the game is short. Paint skating was great and I wanted more of it, but Concrete Genie is a wee game. A big hook relies on you having sympathy for Ash’s bullies, but we don’t really get to know them until after the plot turns. Asking gamers to be patient and empathetic instead of driven and aggressive is a tricky proposition, but for the most part the game does this well. I rushed a short game.Īsh chased by bullies in *Concrete Genie.* Pixelopus / SonyĬoncrete Genie also scores some points for being wholesome. In hindsight, I should have just enjoyed myself more. Once the action starts, painting all but stops. I didn’t know if I was wasting time making extra nice paintings instead of spamming shapes like suns and apples to activate lights and discover more sketchbook pages. The overall pace is slow and poorly communicated. The first half introduces you to the painting mechanics and the second half takes a more traditional action-adventure turn with Ash skating around on paint streaks and hurling fireballs at rogue genies. The game is unofficially split into two parts. The elemental types play a role in solving puzzles, like needing a wind genie to blow a box off a ledge, and they can also give you super paint for scrubbing out especially stubborn darkness. They come in all shapes and sizes depending on what your sketchbook allows/inspires you to create. She gives Ash the ability to paint other genies into existence at special locations across Denska, they control either fire, wind or electricity. She’s not a creepy blue Will Smith genie that pops out of a lamp, but a shaggy Sendak-ian beast that lives inside the walls of a haunted lighthouse. Lightbulb locations are marked on your map so, aside from some light platform puzzling, they’re easy to find.Īsh brings Luna to life in *Concrete Genie.( Pixelopus / SonyĪll this magic comes courtesy of a genie named Luna. Specifically, you paint landscapes themed around a season - spring, summer, fall and winter - that reduce darkness by magically illuminating any nearby strings of lightbulbs hanging around Denska. This gives cover to some old-fashioned collectible hunting: grab more pages, paint more stuff. What you paint is limited to designs found in your sketchbook, a Macguffin of sorts that is torn asunder and scattered on the winds by local bullies. It must’ve taken a lot of work to get such a crucial mechanic exactly right. The painting mechanics are great, with intuitive motion controls (you dip the controller up and down like a brush) and a system that lets people with no artistic ability (i.e. The ooze feeds off negative emotions, but instead of making the Statue of Liberty boogie to Jackie Wilson, you create phantasmic murals with a magical paintbrush that drives the darkness away. An indestructible ooze creeps across Denska, the seaside hometown of Ash, our young hero. Concrete Genie is not a perfect game, but it could be a perfect start for a series or franchise given the solid foundation underlying a wildly fun and creative game, albeit a short and poorly-paced one. And while the price isn’t everything, it’s something I kept in mind while I played Pixelopus’s latest release, a graffiti-driven children’s tale about friendship in an age of darkness.
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