How ‘Concrete Genie’ Paints its Narrative: A Review
When Concrete Genie arrived at my doorstep this week, I dropped everything and binged through the game. It’s a brilliant concept that focuses on wholesome themes, a unique art style, and fun painting mechanics that help push the game’s story forward. Concrete Genie shines as an experience that knows its limits, and can be comfortably played through in a few hours. While it might not shine as a timeless classic with a massive marketing budget, it easily earns a spot along the best games I’ve played all year.
Concrete Genie takes place in the town of Denska, which built its economy on commercial fishing but was sent into decay and abandonment due to a tragic oil spill that ruined the surrounding ocean. You play the game as Ash, a young boy who keeps to himself, allowing his imagination to trail him off into vibrant worlds that are very unlike his surroundings. He draws and paints in a sketchbook, which is where we meet him at the game’s beginning. A group of five bullies taunt, harass, and steal this sketchbook from Ash. As he watches in horror, the bullies tear out all the pages, scatter them to the wind, leaving Ash truly alone. Then, he meets Luna, a genie that brings Ash’s paintbrush to life with magical powers.
With his newly acquired magical abilities, Ash has to scour the city to recover his lost pages, which consist of the eponymous “genies,” which are benign, imagined creatures that could easily look at home in the world of Monsters Inc. These genies serve both as companions and as tools to help Ash through some light puzzle solving sequences. As Ash collects more pages, he can add, edit, and remove aesthetic features to these genies.
The town of Denska is broken up into four main areas, which are locked behind the “darkness,” a kind of purple goo that spiderwebs itself across the world, causing certain areas to be inaccessible to either Ash or his genies. In order to remove this darkness, Ash has to please the genies by painting things they request, like a certain plant, a string of lights, or an apple for a snack. In exchange, these genies radiate love, thanking you by charging Ash’s paint brush with “superpaint,” which Ash can activate for about 15 seconds to quickly clear through the darkness. Once he clears the darkness, the genies can progress and the story continues.
Throughout the story, Concrete Genie tries to encourage you to use your paintbrush to create beautiful scenes. As Ash paints certain areas, the town starts to light up, lifting it from the depressing state that the game begins in. Once Ash has painted all the walls and lit up an area, some more of the darkness clears, and the next area is unlocked for exploration. Though the game markets itself as a canvas for the imagination, I found myself not taking too much time with the painting mechanics after about the first hour and would sometimes spam a bunch of the same images just to fill a wall and clear the area. Certain areas, however, are a little more precise and need to be restored to their former glory, which means Ash must match what he paints to the faded original. These sequences always turned out beautiful in a way that did not happen when I was painting freely on my own.
Concrete Genie’s art style is unique to anything I’ve seen in a video game before. The facial animations appear to be hand drawn or stop-motion, rather than rendered by polygon modeling. The faces reminded me of watching Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which looks primitive but is also evocatively nostalgic. The late game enemies also wear similar facial expressions, which added to their menace. The environments are intentionally depressing, and the town’s design is an effective balance of intricate and simple. And the process of creating genies and painting over dreary walls is completely customizable, which lends this game to a unique sense of player creativity.
Concrete Genie tasks you with using the Dualshock 4’s motion controls to paint, which I found tedious and awkward. Luckily, the game has the accessibility option to swap from motion controls to the right analog stick, which I imagine most players will opt into. I switched within the game’s first half hour and stayed with that option until the game’s end. One delightful surprise with the controls, however, was how responsive Ash felt when running around and platforming. I never had any issues with platforming, clipping, or movement in general. And once you unlock a special ability towards the end, movement goes from good to incredible.
The story progresses as Ash cleans up and restores each area of Denska, and the aforementioned bullies are always lurking in the background, looking to beat up Ash and throw him in the nearest dumpster. Thus, much of the exploration in Concrete Genie takes place via basic stealth mechanics, forcing Ash to take circuitous routes to his sketchbook pages. The bullies follow Ash throughout the game as he unlocks each area, and eventually they have a violent confrontation where one of the bullies kicks Ash in the ribs while he’s down and breaks his magical paintbrush.
After this pivotal and devastating scene, things turn for the worst, and much of what Ash has done to restore Denska is undone by the bullies. The game then becomes about combating corrupted genies rather than collecting pages, and the final chapter of the game is marvelous. The last few hours introduce new mechanics, including the ability to fight off corrupt genies and quickly skate around the city as Ash frantically tries to prevent the darkness from spreading again. Considering the brevity of Concrete Genie, it’s a curious design decision to withhold these expertly crafted mechanics until the game’s final arc. But I was still enthralled when I unlocked them.
As much as I praise this game, I was honestly a bit let down by Concrete Genie. Perhaps I let my imagination wander a bit too far off the page of what the game was promising, with early trailers showcasing what looked to be more interactive freedom than I experienced in the game. But even though I overhyped myself for this game, I still enjoyed it. As the final sequence concluded and the credits rolled, I sat there in silence, losing myself in the music. I realized that this game is still great, though not the masterpiece I was anticipating.
Though the game’s core loop can become repetitive, Concrete Genie is packed with brilliant, beautiful, tense, adorable, and heartwarming moments throughout. I felt my heart break and swell with each new story beat. Even little things, like when one of my genies found a cat sleeping in a box and wanted to play with it, made the town of Denska feel like a real place that I cared about. And as Ash slowly evolved from victim to victor, making amends with his bullies over the course of the story, I felt like this was a complete experience.
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Though it didn’t quite meet my expectations, Concrete Genie is a brilliant package that I’d highly recommend to anyone who loves games that reach out of the box and try something different.
