Imprimatura

(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.