Review for Concrete Genie. Game for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, the video game was released on 09/10/2019
Pablo Picasso said that there are painters who paint the sun as a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
You don't even have to push yourself to bother Magritte and his (not) pipe to bring to the surface of our mind the philosophical (cis) realization of the practical difference between the world of reality and that of its representation, a border that once visualized has the same half-life of a blink of an eye.
We can repeat it a thousand times, but hardly in front of a film, a play, a game, we will not be actively thinking that what happens in front of us is real, that that screen (physical or metaphorical) is nothing more than a window on current events, we victims (in) aware of that willing suspension of disbelief so difficult to sublimate but so easy to splinter.
Video games are a flame like any other at that new home offered by digital entertainment, but they are as unique in the power to shape us as we shape them, with our choices, our approaches, our imprint on the world that exists in them and in which, in them, we are allowed to live and act.
Some titles make the open world their keystone, an endless receptacle for adventures and missions; others find their fulcrum in proposing more maneuvered stories, suffering from the little freedom given to the player in an inversely proportional way to emotional peaks that on-rails storytelling can help achieve; then there are titles like Concrete Genie, with clear and clearly visible boundaries but which give back a micro-world so alive, or so serenely filled with life, that the suspension of disbelief mentioned above cannot prevent us from reaching the certainty that, after all, what happens beyond that wall, that sea, that horizon, we don't care, because our whole world is here.
It is rare that such an intimate game manages to make us concentrate in the here and now with the same naturalness as Concrete Genie, and certainly not with just a magic brush moved by our imagination.
A little less than 2 years after its announcement, the work of PixelOpus arrives exclusively on Playstation 4, ready to fascinate us with delicately touched colors, lights and emotional strings.
In Concrete Genie we dress as Ash, a young boy with an impressive artistic ability who finds himself with the power to give life to what he draws: his palette, Denska, a abandoned coastal town after the dumping into the sea of a huge quantity of oil, a catastrophic event that compromised the natural balance of the bay and was the first step in a sequential spiral of abandonment and decay into which the city was dropped.
Dansk is dark, dark and uninhabited, if not for the group of bullies that run along its streets; the purple tentacles of this “darkness” that seems to envelop and pervade the city so much as to suffocate it are everywhere, and this is the real antagonist without a body in the game, apparently the result of the abandonment of the city.
Ash immediately finds himself in the ambitions of the bullies who, in the initial cutscene, beat him up and tear the pages of the notebook, his personal collection of sketches that ends up scattered around the game map.
Forced to flee in the lighthouse, he will meet Luna, a creature made of color and light that lives on the walls of the structure, and it will be Luna who will give him a magic brush with which, recovering page after page, Ash will be able to imprint shapes and colors on the walls of the city, illuminating it slowly and saving it from the abyss into which the darkness had pushed her; to help him in this arduous undertaking, the "Geni" creatures like Luna forced into the two-dimensionality of the walls on which they are and along which they can run around, but which unlike Luna are almost entirely designed by us.
The storyline is pretty straightforward, it might even seem like cliché at times, but they are truly timeless concepts, narrative archetypes, and emotional triggers, and proof that sometimes it's the simplest, no-nonsense messages that leave the most indelible stain of color on the potential greyness of everyday life.
Concrete Genie gives a lot of freedom to the player, in this: by moving the controller on the axes we could in fact adjust the direction and length of the stroke and, by selecting the design we want to bring to the wall each time, we will be able to illuminate each wall in a riot of pulsating art. life, with a thousand colors and shapes that can only tear a smile from even the most marble players.
If the horizontal mission remains to free the town from darkness by painting it via colored wall after colored wall, the moment-to-moment gameplay mostly sees us chasing the elusive notebook pages necessary to unlock a particular design and then be able to draw it. so as to please this or that genius and let us recharge the so-called "Super Painting“, A superpower that it allows us to paint even over the walls occluded by darkness more leathery, surfaces normally unassailable by our varnished flair and of necessary completion to obtain the passage to the next area.
The 3 macro-zones of which the Concrete Genie map is composed are all perfectly defined in their identity both before and after our rainbowskin intervention, and to reach 100% of some areas you will have to engineer, also using the powers of which the different Genes enjoy: if a cloth could be set on fire by that particular red genius, the blue genius will be able to blow the box on which we rest our feet at a distance, pushing us towards that ledge that until recently was unreachable.
These phases are pleasant and almost always immediate, without ever falling into the pedant or being too hostile, certainly the result of a careful study of game rhythms.
Concrete Genie, in these situations, succeeds in an impossible balance, to make the player feel free to express themselves within the confines of the game engine and the numerous preset designs: apparently, there is an "I" in "design".
The title of Dominic Robilliard is of few words, leaving speeches and inspiration to the images that fill the screen, but it is in his dialectical silences that he finds support in the musical component, a soundtrack that alternates and wisely mixes the intimacy of the winds with the ascending epicity of the chordophones, underlining the events on the screen and dominating them only in the most emotionally trying moments.
Yes, the Unravel feel is present and pulsating.
A particular graphic choice also deserves praise, which only puts in bold the uniqueness of this exclusive PlayStation 4 and its adherence to a complex but precise ecosystem of ideas: if observed closely, perhaps taking advantage of some still images offered by the photo mode, the characters that populate Denska are clearly also the result of a digital brushstroke, a feature that, particularly in facial animations, is more reminiscent of the mechanics of a stop motion 2.0 than the photorealism target of many software houses.
It is an artistic identity that might seem anachronistic or reveal clear limitations of the graphics engine, but in seeing it in action one remains fascinated and the questions leave room for the sense of wonder of the whole.
Concrete Genie has a lifespan of approx 5-6 hours, but finds a small variation of motion about 3/4 of the way through the adventure, moment that slightly out of place compared to the rest of the playthrough: the painting phases are in fact violently replaced by a completely new and faster traversal mechanic, and by a last hour of fighting based on chases, dodges and elemental attacks.
This opening of brackets where the player expected a point is, as already mentioned, a rather intense and unexpected gear change, which only engages after a first moment of disorientation: it is a well-conceived and applied mechanic, but it manages both to confuse in its positioning so close to the outro, and to make us wonder why it wasn't a larger part of the game in its final form .
The last brushstroke of Concrete Genie is a message of peace and union, the natural conclusion of a path of growth for Ash and of emotional rediscovery for his antagonists, framed in a context of empathization towards their past and the internal conflicts that have them led to become villains.
It is not a "NO !!" yelled at bullying, it's more a hand held out to shake that of someone who finds in violence (physical or psychological) on others the apparent muffling of their pain, a mental input to seek the depth and redemption behind those who torment us, rather than to attack them in turn.
There are so many things that divide us, we just have to stop and remember what we have in common, be it joys or sorrows, wins or losses, family or friendships.
In conclusion, Concrete Genie is a short and rather relaxed and relaxing adventure, undermined only by a pre-final that does not fully gain from its unexpected change of register; to give color and life to the title there are simple but effective painting mechanics, a story that, without immense originality, does its best with the palette available, and an innocence of purpose that manages to illuminate even the most dark and rough ego. Get ready to smile and indulge in this year's most sincere and carefree sense of wonder.
► Concrete Genie is an Adventure-type game published by Sony for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, the video game was released on 09/10/2019
