Concrete Genie

When Concrete Genie was first announced, I found its concept of a street artist whose drawings come to life intriguing, as well as its appropriately sketchy art style, though what hooked me was the fact it was compatible with PlayStation VR. Among other games, I would receive this one as a Christmas gift, and so wanted to check this one out as quickly as I could. After finally getting to see what the game is like, I quickly found out it’s not 100% playable in VR, however this did not detract from what I found to be an overall worthy experience.

The seaside town of Denska was once populated and full of life, however it has since become all but abandoned and lifeless. A young artist named Ash draws imaginary creatures called Genies in his sketchbook as he looks out at the town from a dock, however a group of bullies harass him and rip out pages from his sketchbook before sending him on a tram to a lighthouse across the sea. At the lighthouse, Ash runs into one of his Genies, named Luna, who grants him a magic paintbrush that can bring his drawings on walls to life. After seeing the power of the brush to create light with his drawings, Ash is tasked by Luna to bring life back to Denska.

There isn’t too much to the story, however it’s one of those games that doesn’t need a complex story to be effective. During the game, there are instances where each of the bullies try and wrestle Ash’s brush away from him, allowing him to see what events in their lives led to them becoming bullies in the first place. Though them becoming bullies is disagreeable even if what happened to them is sympathetic, which Ash even acknowledges at one point, this contributes heavily to some character development in the late game and leads to a powerful finale. There are also a handful of newspapers scattered across the first few chapters of the game, which the player can read and get an interesting idea as to what happened to make Denska the way it is.

The majority of gameplay involves collecting sketchbook pages around Denska while avoiding or distracting the bullies, giving the game a stealth element. Another major part of gameplay is creating Genies to perform certain tasks; depending on the sketchbook pages you collected, you are able to customize their appearance, including bodies, ears, tails and other accessories. The powers of the Genies include fire, electricity and wind, which contributes to a small puzzle-solving aspect of the game as these powers are often needed to access new areas. Genies, however, can only be created in designated spots, which another living sketch on Ash’s backpack, named Splotch, is able to direct you to when you are nearby.

The other sketchbook pages you can collect are Landscape Sketches, which can be painted on walls and are fully animated. Sometimes you may be asked to draw certain sketches by Genies in order to create certain moments or otherwise make them happy, either to get them to perform a task or to give you Super Paint, which allows you to paint away darkness and has a limited supply. Sketches can also be used to restore billboards, bringing them to life and revealing more about Denska. Interestingly, the sketches you paint around the levels are remembered throughout your entire playthrough, even in the main menu and between breaks, giving Denska a look wholly unique to your experience.

Denska can be customized however you want.

The game has a rather interesting art style, apart from the appropriately sketchy look of the street art. While the levels have a solid middle ground between realistic and stylized, the characters themselves have facial features that are seamlessly animated more two-dimensionally against a three-dimensional model, giving the game a unique look. Flashbacks and credits scenes are rendered wholly two-dimensionally, allowing them to stand out and depict events that would otherwise be difficult with the 3D assets, though the way in which they are done has an emotional core in itself.

The game is VR compatible, in that there are two modes that take full advantage of the platform. One of them, labeled VR Experience, is called Splotch and the Crystal Caverns, in which you draw sketches in a fully three-dimensional space to help Splotch collect crystals; though short, about 20 minutes or so, the experience is well worth it. Completing this mode or the first part of the Story mode enables Free Paint mode, which allows you to revisit areas from the base game and the first VR mode and paint whatever you want with the sketchbook pages you already collected. The different Free Paint areas are also designed differently from each other and offer a lot of free space to play around with, including the ability to create Genies whenever you want, though my only complaint is that, unlike the Story mode, there’s no ability to erase brush strokes that I could see outside of erasing the whole canvas.

Concrete Genie is an enjoyable experience both in and out of VR. Though not that difficult of a game to get through, the story is written well and the main drawing mechanic offers a lot of creativity, plus the fact that the game remembers your creations adds more uniqueness to your playthrough. There isn’t too much to the VR compatibility, however if you have the peripheral, the parts that are compatible are worth the investment.