charming little game about making art! you get more tools and colors as you explore the world, which i think is a neat touch. some of the prompts are interesting! i like these kinds of games where you're given tools and you're given free reign to do whatever you see fit with them. i like the aesthetics, the colors are very pleasing. the grades you get for your assignments do feel somewhat arbitrary sometimes, i mostly disregard the grades. my only complaint is that there's no settings menu to change things like control sensitivity or anything like that. there's not much else i would describe as "bad" in this game. it's a short casual game, but that's fine because it's not trying to be anything more than that.

Playing this in a post AI "art" world is really interesting. In a way, the random aspect of the ratings encapsulated the kinds of outputs that AI gives us when given a prompt. Sometimes it's really accurate, scarily accurate, almost. And sometimes it literally makes no sense. The worst part is, you can never tell why.

Of course, I didn't fully grasp that the results were totally random until I read some of these reviews. Like, I started to catch on when I would get near full bars in the categories but then still get a C. But it is a bit disappointing in a way.

I think the biggest reason I couldn't sit with Art Sqool is because the game's controls were some of the worst I've ever seen, and I'm not talking about the drawing mechanic either, that was fine. No, see, when it's time to draw, you're thrown into some random area on this big map, and you're told to explore. You unlock more colors and brushes by exploring and finding them. However, exploring is incredibly tedious and frustrating. Walking is incredibly slow, painfully so, and yet when you change directions, the camera whips around at high speeds, which managed to give me a headache. Not to mention, there's no way to change the camera angle or perspective, so the entire time, you can't even see what's directly in front of you because your player character is in the way and you can't get a bird's eye view or even look past them. The camera does zoom in/out based on how close you are to a wall, but that doesn't help in big open areas. A few times it happened where I fell into a hole through the map and into the floor boundaries (which doesn't kill you and instead warps you to the grading process) because I couldn't see that it was even there, right in front of me. And I could be wrong, but it seemed like not even every map-area had a tool or color to be found, so in some areas, exploring would've gotten you nothing. It's not even that the areas themselves are unfun or uninteresting. It's just that the act of moving around was so bad.

I don't say this lightly, but I genuinely think this game would've been so much better had it been built in Roblox, because at least then, there's the default camera and movement controls that wouldn't've had to be altered.