Combat does come into play toward the third act, as dark genies begin to appear. Those choices can affect their personalities, and finding yourself with an army of cheerful paint friends, who act like loyal pups or mischievous rascals, bonds you to them. As for those genies, though you choose from predetermined base builds, you can add tails, ears, horns, and other design elements to make them your own, while also deciding on their size and scale. My version of Denska will likely look a lot different from yours based on what art designs you’re drawn to, and everything you paint is persistent throughout the game.
Ps4 concrete genie free#
Strands of light will come to life as you paint on the walls around them, but other than your genies specifically asking for a certain drawing here and there, you’re largely free to paint whatever you want. In Free Paint, you can use PlayStation Move motion controllers to create beautiful landscapes.Play As you go from one part of Denska to the next, you’re effectively painting the lights back on, while pushing the darkness out. You can help a genie discover a mysterious power through painting and see the art come to life in VR.
The game has two PlayStation VR modes, dubbed VR Experience and VR Free Paint. The art of the painted town reminded me of Pixar’s Coco with its dazzling lights and colors. Ash learns to foster them, exploit their powers, and protect them. The creatures are cute and fuzzy, and they have their own unique characteristics. That is an amazing effect, and one that the developers struggled to get right.
They can bend around the corners and move to other walls and follow you around the town. But they come to live and move around, as if the wall is a frame in a cartoon. These genies are flat, 2D characters who live in the surfaces of the walls. One of the neat technical tricks that Pixelopus pulled off was embedding the genies into the walls. You take the paintbrush and dip it into a template, like a field of green grass, and spray that grass on the wall. The game teaches you to hold the PlayStation motion controller in your hand and move it about to spray images on the wall. Rather than fighting violence with more violence, it was about opposing them only to the point where you can win them to your side.Īlthough the controls can be hard to deal with, I liked the intention behind them.
But because he knows where they come from, he tries to overcome those demons, befriend the creatures, and win them over with kindness. Ash has to free them by fighting the nightmarish creatures. Those creatures have grabbed control of the bullies, wrapping them in a kind of black good. In the latter part of the game, Ash has to fight against dark creatures who are manifestations of the inner demons of the bullies. Rather than treat those bullies as enemies, Ash responds with compassion. And for the bullies in particular, it may be because their home lives are broken. They may be in a part of their life when they’re lashing back against beautiful things. For whatever reason, some people may be angry. They’re all that he has, as his once beautiful town is abandoned by everybody except a handful of bullies who make Ash’s life miserable.Īs Ash struggles to bring each part of the town back, he realizes that not everybody appreciates beauty. What you’ll likeĪsh is a loner artist who finds solace in creating beautiful, imaginary friends that are the game’s genies. They give him magical abilities to fight the bullies and the nightmare creatures that they spawn. That forces Ash into his own inner turmoil, as he has to recover his sketch pages, escape from or confront the bullies, and then fight back.īut Ash’s imagination helps him against the bullies, as the genies he creates come to life and urge him to restore the beauty of the town. The bullies’ own internal demons cause them to lash out at Ash and the beautiful images he creates. The neighborhood bullies menace Ash and try to destroy his artwork, ripping the pages from his sketchbook and scattering them around town. And he dreams of bringing fanciful creatures known as genies to life.īut with the dreams also comes nightmares. Ash loves to sketch the way the town used to be, before an environmental disaster polluted it. The game from Sony’s small Pixelopus studio in San Mateo, California, debuted this week for $30 as an exclusive for the PlayStation 4.Ĭheck out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.Ĭoncrete Journey is both a tale about a boy saving a town and an inner psychological journey, played out on the canvas of a video game.
0 kommentar(er)
