Mini Painter

I just found this game in a pixel art group on Facebook, the OP said how they burned out making a game about burning out and it caught my interest.

A little bit about myself: I´ve always wanted to work with illustration, comics, art in general, but could never fulfill my dreams.

Just yesterday, I was feeling incredibly down. I managed to find a minimal wage paying job after nearly a year unemployed, and I the pressure of thinking that my life could never be anything beyond that, just living a mediocre and average life, after a life full of dreams that I had never coming true, it hit like a wall.

After 2 years of waiting to be called for and major art course, I finally received the acceptance letter, but it arrived at a moment when I can´t afford it anymore. With no time and completely exhausted to keep on working on my projects, seeing no prospect for the future, I went to sleep feeling like I should only accept things, not try to do or be anything special, just a regular person in this world, leaving all my dreams behind.

Today, I found this little game, and the game reminded me of something.

There´s only one thing that you can actually do in the game, besides purchashing things. You can work.

It is a game about burning out, so yuou can only work, force yourself to work and make sure that you don´t to exactly that, burn out.

So you can either force youserlf to work or just wait.

The game is slow, you may not even call it a game. It´s not even a window that opens up when you start the game.

It´s a small room right at the corner of your screen. A room with barely anything inside, its walls are run-down. the sofa and carpet are stained. Your work is to paint mini figs. Each one of them takes time, and you need to relax to not give up.

Each one of the figs is worth a bit of money, money you can spend either purchasing new figs to paint and sell or purchasing things for you home.

It is slow, you just watch the room by the corner of your screen as the character slowly but surely works on his figs, slowly but surely renovate his apartment, slowly but surely manages to get where he wants.

The game ends when you get enough money to buy a vacation and truly relax.

And that´s what this game reminded me of, something that I absolutely needed today.

Things don´t happen in a day. Of course we want to realize all our dreams in an instant, feel the sense of accomplishment and say "I did it". But it is a slow process, one that can be incredibly tiresome, one that may seem that you work and work and you still stuck in the same place. But you´re not.

Slowly but surely, you can make things happen. Slowly but surely, you can achieve your goals. Slowly but surely you can reach that point were you can say "I did it".

This review may seen a vit convoluted and maybe out of the curve with what the game is about, but it is how I felt and God knows I needed that today.

So thank you OP that made the post about your game in that facebook group, it may not have been your intention with the game, but it brought me a huge amount of confort and reminded me of how things work.

10/10, biased but trully grateful.

This is a terrible "idle" game because you can't really idle it at all. You constantly need to tell your dude to keep working or you won't make progress.

Firstly the positive: it's cute and has some nice pop-culture references with the figurines and decorations you unlock. Also you can buy him a cat (which doesn't really do anything, though, and you can't pet it. Boo!). Now for the negative:

So the only way to earn money and make progress in this game is for the little dude to paint figurines. He has an energy (or "relaxation") bar, which gets drained by working and recovers when he sleeps or interacts with his other stuff like the TV, consoles, books etc. When it hits 0% he goes into "burn-out" mode and becomes unable to work until he recovers. When it hits 100% he goes into "lazy" mode and won't work again until you tell him to. The problem is, he constantly stops working, no matter his energy level. You could have just told him to work at 100% energy, he then stops at 91% energy. You tell him to work again, he stops again at 86% energy and so on. If you don't tell him to work, he will occasionally decide to do it himself, but mostly just walk around lazily or sleep, even at 100% energy.

So basically you have to click on his desk every 1-5 minutes to tell him to keep working or you won't make any progress at all. And that's literally the only thing you can do in this game other than buy upgrades. You can't even tell him to STOP working when he gets close to 0% and is about to go into "burn-out" mode. The only interaction you have is to make him work, which you have to do CONSTANTLY, no matter his energy level. The only other thing you can do is buy upgrades which unlock new figurines to paint, make him recover energy faster or work faster (and also visually get added to his room). But progress is INCREDIBLY slow, it takes ages to finish a single high-value figurine, and even then you need to finish a bunch of them to buy the later upgrades. All the while you have to keep reminding him every few minutes to keep working, over and over and over again, or you will make zero progress.

You can later buy an alarm clock that supposedly snaps him out of "lazy" mode and gets him to work again, but it only helps once he reaches that lazy mode, which means you've already wasted a bunch of time of him doing nothing. Also it's EXTREMELY expensive (one of the most expensive upgrades), so for most of the game you won't even have that.

So overall, horrible, infuriating game design. It's not really an "idle" game because if you go afk for a bit he literally just stops working and you won't make any progress, but there's also nothing to do other than repeatedly click his desk every time he stops working.

This game is so close to being good, but fails on every mark. It says idle, but if you don't interact with the desk every few minutes your guy will just go into a lazy mode where he does nothing. So you can't idle, but the only thing you can tell your guy to do is paint, but you only need to do that every couple of minutes, you have a draining relaxation bar that prevents you from forcing him to do work more than a few times in a row for most of the game. So it isn't idle, it isn't interactive, the "upgrades" you can buy don't do enough to allow you to play fully interactive right to the end of the game. Oh and from what I can tell the final achievement isn't earnable because you buy the vacation upgrade and it just puts a suitcase on your front step saying the plane is delayed a few days forever.

I don't know if this will improve over time with some developer work, but right now the amount of attention it requires fully misses the mark for making this game idle or cozy past the first couple hours.