Imprimatura

This was a short, lovely game. Your deceased father was a prolific painter, and he left you a choice of 7 paintings in his will. You can sift through the paintings and choose the 7 you want the most.

Each painting has a different style and emotion. The game intuits what you’re going for in your collection, and a segment at the end is based on that, with a series of illustrations (but not of the seven paintings you choose).

This game is like an eclair to me: small, simple, but exquisite in taste. The CSS was nice, the background music pleasant, and the writing such that I enjoyed each sentence.

There’s not much to do outside of selecting the paintings, but this is the kind of game that I don’t think would be served well by expansion; it seems complete in itself. I had a good time (maybe because I chose the happier paintings and it reminded me of good times with both my father and son, and because I’ve gotten into art this year and loved getting new ideas). I do think it would be neat to have the drawings of the paintings in-game, but I understand why they’re not there (hard to make, especially since they’re described as high-quality, and our imagination can perhaps produce a stronger effect).

As you mourn the loss of a family member, you are left to collect a number of their art collection, as per their will. Left with this difficult and emotional choice, you will relive the spent with them, sharing their passion for painting, and figuring out what it means to you. What they meant to you.

The game touches on and explores, through the lens of art, very real and personally relevant subjects for me such as grief, specifically through the loss of a loved one, one's personal struggle with choosing a career in art or not, the meaning of memory (and the meaning of art in life), and much more. I also greatly appreciated the unique gameplay which was central in the concluding portion (when you paint the last canvas) when "combining" all seven paintings.

All that being said, I was still left frustrated by the fact that the memories conjured by each painting you selected were NOT tied to a specific painting... I felt that this undermined the significance of the paintings themselves. The memories still somewhat lined up with the paintings' descriptions, for the most part, but I really would have preferred if it had given a specific memory/meaning to each artwork. Regardless, I would recommend it!

This was a polished and well-written game that unfortunately I didn’t really connect with. After finishing my first playthrough, per the game's explicit encouragement I restarted, expecting to see entirely new memories and paintings. But then five out of seven paintings and the same number of memories were repeats from my first playthrough. The memories were tied to different paintings, though, and it was disappointing to learn that the pairings hadn't been deliberately curated.

I also was never really emotionally engaged. The PC is clearly a specific character, rather than a blank-slate/self-insert; they have these specific memories of their relationship with the artist character, and they’ve made certain life choices like giving up painting to work at an ad agency. So I couldn’t pretend it was actually me going through this, but I also didn’t learn enough about the PC to really give me a sense of them as a person, which left me feeling emotionally distant from them and their remembrances of the artist. (It doesn’t help that the memories I got on my initial playthrough made that character come across as an asshole who I personally wouldn’t have kept putting up with.)

I also didn't vibe with the choice (Spoiler - click to show)to make the painting be automatically created for me at the end; it felt like the game was dictating what my emotional response to the memories should be. (Spoiler - click to show)I would have found it much more meaningful to get to decide for myself what subject, mood, etc. the painting should focus on—being able to interpret the memories for myself, using the choices of what to paint to reflect on what I took from them. Being allowed to adjust the painting afterward was nice but didn’t hit the same way doing it myself from the start would have.

Someone has died: our father, mother, grandmother or grandfather. The choice 'grandmother' feels canonical, since the author dedicates the game to Elizabeth Walton Williams who I think is their grandmother. But as far as I know the choice makes no difference to the game.

The deceased was a famous painter, and as part of their will they have left us seven paintings -- though not seven specific paintings. It is up to us to choose seven pieces from among those that are left in their atelier. This is where play starts. We are given brief descriptions of paintings, often though not always accompanied by a sentence indicating its emotional mood. Then we choose whether to take it or leave it. If we take it, the painting triggers a memory of our interactions with the deceased. These memories are somewhat randomised, although they are chosen to fit the painting at least a little. Both the chosen painting and memories are saved for the player's perusal. Once seven paintings have been chosen, a non-interactive scene follows in which the player character finishes an unfinished painting, taking inspiration from the colours, subjects and moods of the chosen paintings. This final painting and the stages of its completion are shown as pictures in the game itself -- the first and only time that the game uses visuals.

The game is highly polished, both when it comes to details such as the Twine customisation and the music that plays in the background, and when it comes to what is most important, the writing. The paintings are diverse and described as well as it is possible to describe a painting in a few sentences. And the memories, which are the most important parts of the prose, are interesting, vivid, and well-written. Some feel slightly more generic -- a burst of anger after the child ruined a canvas -- but others manage to generate a real sense of individuality -- such as the one about the bakery.

Necessarily, a character portrait done in seven brief memories remains impressionistic; or, to use another metaphor from the history of painting, cubist, giving us a few snapshots of the deceased from different directions, which suggest but don't actually constitute depth. There's only so much you can do with memories that are brief, few in number, and narratively independent from each other. I would hesitate to call what results a 'character study'. We remain far too much at the surface for that.

The mechanics of the piece raise questions both mundane and philosophical. One soon finds out that the total number of paintings is not very large; the 'next' painting seems to be chosen entirely randomly, so you will start seeing paintings twice, or even see the same painting twice in a row, as if the protagonist is too confused to remember which paintings they've already looked at.

More importantly, there is something strange about first choosing whether to keep the painting, and then getting a memory. Shouldn't we choose based on what the painting reminds us of? Of course the game needs to work the way it actually does, because it would deflate the experience if we could first check out all the memories and then had to choose seven from among them. You want to have seven memories, no more, and no going back. Still, the current set-up doesn't leave the player with much agency. The main thing one can do to steer the story one way or another is choose paintings with 'positive' emotions or paintings with 'negative' emotions; this will definitely colour the memories one gets, and it may also colour -- literally -- the final painting we ourselves make.

Here the philosophical question pops up. There are paintings both negative and positive. If we choose the negative paintings, our memory portrait of the deceased will be emotionally negative; if we choose positive paintings, our memory portrait will be positive. But this is clearly and explicitly a selection effect. We can only end up with negativity by ignoring the positive, and we can only end up with positivity by ignoring the negative. Is Imprimatura trying to tell us that we can form our own relation to the past by choosing what we want to remember? That's an interesting vision, no doubt, but it would seem to require us to abandon the quest for truth and perhaps authenticity. Given the centrality of these ideas to how Imprimatura works, I would have liked it to engage with such questions more deeply.

(Spoilers in this one; a lot of what I have to say about this game has to do with the ending. It’s relatively short and well worth playing, so definitely do that before reading this review if you’re at all interested).

I like going to art museums, but even more than that I really like reading about art. Yes, yes, I know the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and presumably that can be extended to painting, but at the same time, I find my appreciation of art is often much deepened when I come to it after seeing what a perceptive critic has to say about a particular work (I love reading A.S. Byatt for this kind of thing, for example); they can share historical context, sure, but also just an analysis of how it functions, what choices the artist made, how it does (or at least is intended to) impact the viewer. Some of this is surely an artifact of not being an artist myself – I often need things explained to me slowly – but I think there also can be something magical about the way prose can complement a picture, teasing out the purpose behind fine details, zooming out to engage with the emotions, and reversing the alchemy by which an artist incarnates the spiritual into the concrete.

So I am entirely on board with Imprimatura’s project, as I understand it. This Twine game is built around two twinned tracks: in the first, you visit the studio of a deceased relative (you can define the exact relation) to pick out the seven paintings that’ve been left to you in your will, while in the second you recall memories of your relationship with them. The first track wholly depends on short prose descriptions of the pieces being able to sell the talent, and psychological considerations, your relative brought to their art, and I found it entirely successful, so much so that my first time through the game I chose to keep the first septet of paintings I encountered since they all seemed so engaging. Here’s one that could stand for many others:

"The painting you choose is called ‘Photosynthesis.’ A massive tropical plant is rendered in green blocks, styled in a geometric pattern like a stained glass window. At the top is a teal bloom just beginning to open. Looking at the painting makes you feel optimistic, like a door has just opened inside you."

Admittedly, I don’t always love it when authors tell the player how they feel (the protagonist is lightly characterized, so they don’t serve as much of a filter), but it seems appropriate here because it helps efficiently communicate the emotional valence of each piece without larding up the more descriptive bits with heavy-handed adjectives, and it also helps make the game’s mechanics more legible. This isn’t just an open-ended exercise; the paintings you pick influence the ending, with the artistic movements, color palettes, and general vibe of your chose collection being carefully tracked.

The second half of the game, the memories, are less mechanically engaging – there are no choices to be made or narrative implications so far as I could tell – but still work well enough on their own terms. There’s a large variety of them (at least I didn’t see any repeats after two full playthroughs) and different players will walk away with a different sense of the relative, and their relationship to the protagonist, depending on which they see and in which order they’re presented. Each vignette is quite condensed, requiring you to fill in some blanks to piece together a full view of things, but regardless the picture is credibly complex; your relative was a very successful artist who had warm feelings for you, but struggled in many areas, clearly dealing with undigested trauma, envy, and isolation. As a result, your painting choices feel something like going through a Rorschach test, deciding which of these mutable colors should predominate.

I didn’t find that the culminating moment of the game was as effective as what led up to it, though differently so in each of my playthroughs. The last sequence involves finding the outline of a last painting, which you finish yourself; unlike the rest of the game, this sequence is presented via graphics. You decide you want to adopt elements of your relative’s style in completing their work, which is where the consequences of your choices come in – or at least where they can come in. My first time through, since I was accepting paintings more or less at random, the game seemed to struggle to assess what style most resonated with me, which led it to pepper me with questions about how I wanted to approach the painting. It’s a reasonable design solution, but it made me feel like the finale was disconnected from what had come before, since I was just making all the important decisions at the end. My second time through, by contrast, I took a more aesthetically coherent approach to my choices, which led to a host of automatic decisions being made in the endgame; the price of this aesthetic consistency, though, is that I felt like I didn’t have much to do.

Beyond these mechanical issues, the finale also felt like it departed from what had been effective in the earlier part of the game. I liked the prose describing the works of art, and while the game continues to narrate what you’re trying to do as you finish the last painting, I found the writing was less rather than more impactful when paired with graphics that were inevitably different from, and flatter than, what I was imagining based on the words. The ending’s catharsis also feels like it relies on a key element of the backstory that’s revealed through memories – namely, that the protagonist was once the relative’s protégé, but decided to quit painting to get an office job. Returning to the art that united you with your mentor should be a poignant moment, but I found that the decision to make the protagonist weakly characterized dramatically undercut its effectiveness: in neither playthrough did I feel like I had a handle on why the protagonist made that decision in the first place, so revisiting and possibly reversing it didn’t fully land.

When Imprimatura sticks to its knitting, though – words over visuals, the relative as the central character rather than the notional protagonist – I found it effective indeed, and a relatively weaker ending can’t undermine that too badly. After all, nobody expects an artist’s retrospective to come to a narratively satisfying climax; it’s all about walking through, tarrying with a particular piece that strikes your fancy, trying to make sense of a particular motif or color scheme that seems to haunt several of the works, psychoanalyzing the artist based on what you think you see, or yes, if you’re me, maybe trying to crib an explanation from the writing on the placards or an exhibit catalog you pick up at the end. And on those criteria, Imprimatura delivers.