Casual Gaming Saturday 10

Game: Aspiring Artist

Created By: Neko_puf and Awoodamary

Platform: PC (Kongregate)

Art-based games are a strange breed. Sometimes, you have to be the artist, placing pixels just so. Sometimes, you’re an art critic, granting points or stars. Sometimes, you do both.

Not so with Aspiring Artist.

This is an idle game, which means that most of the action is caused, not by crafting artworks you think up and realize, but by making a ready-made picture appear more quickly. Your currencies here are Ink (which comes in different colors) and Prestige Points (which make everything faster over time).

Basically, you watch a picture slowly appear, clicking on upgrades to make the picture appear faster and faster. Every finished pixel-art “painting” gives you some temporary improvement to your ink speed, which makes the next painting that much faster.

To be perfectly honest, though, I’ve mostly been playing NGU Idle and Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, because this is not a game that holds my attention. It’s too bad, too, because the pixel art is actually pretty good! I think it’s because there’s no sort of story to hold my attention, and the speed boosts hit a wall pretty fast.

Then again, this game is only a few weeks old! I’m sure the developers are still ironing out the kinks and working on improvements. That’s one of the things I like about Kongregate – creators can interact with players to figure out good improvements and upgrades pretty easily, and ratings that you give games are always changeable.

The current rating of this game is 3.91/5, which I think is fair for a new game with such minimalist gameplay and graphics.

I’m finishing up the Christmas tree “painting” while writing this. I’m also listening to jazz and playing Idle Champions of the Realms (gotta get those Lute Strings while the event is ongoing! Happy Ahghairon’s day…). Ah, Painting finished.

I am, actually, pretty interested to see what’s next in line for paintings on this game, but I’d only suggest Aspiring Artist if you’re both very patient and very bored. Or you just like seeing what the kids are doing with pixel-art these days…

That’s going to do it for me, today, folks. I hope you’re enjoying the blog, so far!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC