Passpartout

Artists can have a tough time making a living for themselves, even if they are really good at what they do. In some fields, recognition can take you further than talent, although that’s not necessarily true in all instances. Hence, although there are many modern artists out there practicing a variety of painting styles, only some of them are known on a large scale.

Passpartout is a game in which you can pretend to be an artist and sell your art to random people that visit your gallery. The game provides you with a canvas and a few basic colors for you to achieve the desired results, as well as a wide selection of customers that have unique preferences and requests. Your final goal is to survive and maybe even get rich along the way.

To begin with, you start with a certain amount of cash, a blank canvas and an empty gallery. Each painting you add must be drawn from scratch, which might prove rather annoying to those who are not artists. In any case, this is an opportunity for you to relax and not worry about the results, which means that you can just doodle anything you want and put a price tag on it at the end.

Although the clients seem to make their decision at random, you can still see the vague outline of the algorithm underneath. As such, some of them will buy anything with a brush mark on it as long as it is not expensive, while others will pay a lot just because the name you have chosen is good enough. Still, it’s the price range that dictates most purchases anyway, so you don’t need to worry too much at the moment.

At the end of each month, you have to pay the utilities and continue to live on what you have left. Once you run out of money, everything turns to dust. That still leaves you plenty of time to make the required money, even if you have to sell $25 squiggly lines paintings as fast as possible. The graphics and the user interface are pretty nice, although you shouldn’t expect anything too great either.

While it is obvious that Passpartout is merely an experiment at the moment, the idea is cool enough to merit additional effort. However, it could use some additional colors in the palette, as well as a smoother brush movement on the canvas. The customers seem to be rather few, which leaves you staring at nothing for most of the time after you fill the gallery.