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).

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.