I loved Cultist Simulator so when I saw another developer taking the same mechanics and apply them to the life of an artist, I knew I just had to buy it. This is a much more modestly sized and consequently shorter game however. Like its inspiration, this is quite a handful at first as your fledgling artist must grapple with poverty and mental illness. But once you understand the basic loop, you only have to search for a victory condition and go straight towards it. It’s not actually very difficult but there’s much more randomness than in Cultist Simulator and once you achieve one, there’s not much difference in going for another victory type so I doubt this has much replay value. Still, I love its theme and I want to reward developers who make quirky games like this.

You’re an artist in the city of Nova Opportunia, out to make your fame and fortune. The game offers a choice of three pre-made characters, Vincia Einstone, a young and passionate artist who is penniless but has no emotional baggage; Andre Flowers, a man whose mother has just died and struggles with loneliness; and Charles Eiffel who has already established himself as an artist of some repute but has to support an expensive lifestyle and an addiction to alcohol. In practice, the latter two choices serve as higher difficulty settings as you need to deal with a continual source of bad vibes. Once you’ve built up your artist sufficiently with a sizable store of money and reputation, there’s not much difference in terms of gameplay between the various paths. As you surmise, the core gameplay loop consists of painting works of art and then successfully selling them for both money and reputation. You’ll always need money to live on and reputation directly affects the value of your paintings.

The mechanics are mostly the same as Cultist Simulator though you do get more possible actions and you can do them all at the same time. So at any given time, you can work on a painting, visit a place, talk to a friend, think about a topic and so on. Thinking in general is a very flexible action to just using it on your cost of living can freeze the timer, costing you less money. To paint, you need to spend the Passion resource and use something as inspiration. This can be a feeling, a memory, a place, a person and so on. The higher value the inspiration, the better the painting. Feelings of the same color can be intensified by merging them with the think action. Visiting the city opens up more locations and each one does something different. Visiting the ocean for example is usually good to recharge your Sanity resource or gain blue feelings like Calmness and Peace. The Art Palace is where you go to sell your best paintings but as it is usually locked for a time after you sell one, you might need to sell your lesser ones at the Bar Avenue or the streets of the city.

As usual there are multiple victory conditions, usually by creating a unique painting of some kind. I was stumped for a while when I first came across the idea of one such masterpiece but the game is actually quite straightforward in that you only have to think on it with the right other cards to evolve it and then just paint it. Of course, you can lose the game in many ways as well. On my first go, I fell sick and had no money to get it treated. The illness worsened and eventually killed me. You can also get mugged in the city and lose a lot of health, potentially killing you. If you let your unwanted mental conditions or alcoholism get out of control, many bad things can happen too. In general however this is not a hard game so long as you take care never to get more than one unwanted condition at a time. You can usually use the paint action to get rid of them over time if you don’t have the matching good feeling to instantly counteract them. Once you get enough reputation, money is easy to come by as well.

The primary frustration of this game is that it’s incredibly random. Visiting a given place can have a bewildering number of different results. As I mentioned above, the ocean is usually a safe place to visit as you rarely get bad outcomes there. However while you do mostly get blue feelings there, you can also get green and more rarely yellow feelings. Sometimes you can even get bad feelings like Sadness or get sick. There’s such a wide range of potential outcomes and other locations can be even more random. In the city proper, you might run across a stranger that gives you money and a valuable idea. Or you might get mugged, lose half your health and your money. The requirements for many of the victory conditions aren’t actually that onerous. Yet there’s such a wide disparity in what can happen as a result of your actions that it feels like purely a matter of luck. This means that if you’re willing to save scum, and the game certainly makes this easy, you can beat it in fairly short order. Just save before an action completes and reload the game until you get the outcome you need.

I really wanted to like this game but I think it uses its theme too shallowly. You’ll notice that there’s no indicator for artist skill or talent. Reputation is all that matters. There are no mechanics to have your artist to specialize in a genre or develop a specific style. You can paint a portrait one moment, switch to scenery the next and finish with an abstract painting as your magnus opus. It all depends on the card-based inspirations you have available. This means that while it’s nifty to look at what you actually paint at first, very soon it stops mattering. All you care about is the painting’s numerical value. As an aside, this game does use AI-generated art for these paintings which offended some parties. I’m fine with it as it’s meant to be a somewhat generic representation of the types of artwork from that era. Anyway, I’m glad that this game exists and I love others doing more with the mechanics of Cultist Simulator. I have to acknowledge however that it’s not a terribly deep game and most people will be done with it very quickly.