SuchArt: Genius Artist Simulator lets you unleash your inner artist in outer space
Everything can be art if you have enough paint
Last year, I pitched an idea to Graham where I’d follow a Bob Ross tutorial in VR. I failed. I couldn’t find a painting sim that would support my artistic endeavours. Not a single one let me make a happy little tree in the way I’d hoped. Though it’s not a VR game, the just released SuchArt: Genius Artist Simulator otherwise fits the bill. It's by far the best painting game I've played, and a whole lot more.
Like all good games, it’s set in 2130, in space, and your DNA test tells you to be a ‘genius artist’. So you set-up an easel and get on with it. There are so many tools to play with. Pencils and paint, different brushes, sprays, knives, stencils, and, for some reason, flamethrowers. Paint is probably the most important part of the game. It gloops, it mixes, it sprays. You can be subtle with it, which is what was missing from all the other painting sims I dug out.
Though you’re welcome to splatter paint on every surface and call it ‘art’, you also have tasks that befit that of a working painter, such as commissions that will pay out and let you unlock more space in your studio. You might even get some exposure, the best of all things (according to the developers, that really is a thing in the game).
I played with the free version when it came out earlier in the year and had a lot of fun. Accordingly, I was expecting a well simulated, perfectly textured painter’s palette to play with, but the full game has a whole simulation of an artist’s life in there. Paint runs out, brushes cost money, inspiration comes in the form of a unicorn on your computer desktop... And there’s also a suggestion that the robots are taking over and aliens are invading. Maybe that flamethrower has another use?
If you, too, want to indulge in your creative, flame-based whims, SuchArt: Genius Artist Simulator is out now on Steam.