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.

Art Sqool is a colourful and fun pastime

Gameplay:
There isn't much to it but they have so many cool and interesting prompts and some of these brushes are a joy to use and combine and am proud of my creations. The environments are amazing and I constantly choose different camera angles. It is a fairly basic drawing tool but I would recommend at times using a stylist since the small screen on switch can mess a few things up.

Art Style:
From this games name and cover you can tell it is a colourful ride and it is for sure. I love this game and finding these different areas makes me so happy. The colours are limited but kind of adds to the fact of improvising but I still would of liked a few more.

Overall:
In the end it is a nice fun game and for its price point I would recommend. Doing this once a day is a nice fun thing and I find it a worlde kind of thing weirdly except here I don't need to figure out words that I would never guess!
3.5/5

art sqool's strengths hit a very touching, subconscious part of my soul, but its weak points were fucking embarrassing and egregious.

just exploring around the weird abstract campus and drawing stuff with an extremely limited toolset evoked a lot of memories and fears surrounding my childhood and my current experiences at college. all the little islands are super charming. i was really happy with a lot of the things i made in the game, and i'm glad they give you a folder of your drawings as shareable pngs. nothing about its execution feels cynical or dramatic, it's just there to let you take your own experience from it.

but goddamn fuck the grading system on this game, i have no idea what these prompts are checking for. i got stuck on one where they wanted you to draw your first memory, and it rejected 10 drawings before finally accepting a grease brush blob.

also the main character design looks like someone that would emotionally manipulate me

overall i don't think this will do much for people who aren't already into art, but it's a nice 2-3 hour trip for people that wanna break their art block or get a neat change of pace. recommended.

I will give one nice compliment to Art Sqool and it is that it has good drawing prompts and provides excellent jumping points for drawing exercises. The game is otherwise not visually interesting enough to be the "canvas" to these prompts. The environment is rather dull and empty in a game that's supposed to inspire creativity. It does the very minimum to be a game, locking art tools that require exploration to unlock. Instead of going to Art Sqool, just use the prompts and go outside for your canvas.

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.

Good idea, poor execution.

Unfortunately Art Sqool is mostly style over substance.

The main gist of it is that you are an art student called Froshmin who attends an art college assisted by a professor composed of artificial intelligence.

You get to explore a campus full of random objects and architecture and draw pictures with provided MS Paint-level tools, but in the end it doesn't amount to much because the controls aren't very good, there's no in-game tutorials, hell there's not even an option menu.

The novelty of Art Sqool wears off after about an hour of playing. The campus's random nature and poor controls are off-putting and made me not want to explore further to find all the brushes. I only managed to find all swatches.

The idea with you being provided prompts for your art pieces is good, but the grading system feels very arbitrary and borderline unfair due to no direction or feedback system to tell you what the AI wants from you.

I could draw random blobs of colour sometimes and get a B or A, but other times I could spend time and effort trying to make something good only for the AI to give me a C at best or get me to redo it all again at worst.

I expected a lot more out of this game but in the end, even though I managed to finish it, I wouldn't recommend it because it feels like the dev had an idea for the main concept and visuals but ran out of steam when it came to the actual gameplay.

My younger brother went to an actual real-life art school and graduated a few years ago and I'm incredibly proud of him. That said, it cost several thousand dollars and took four years to graduate.

Meanwhile, I paid $7 to create this masterpiece in a couple of minutes.

Should've just gone to Art Sqool.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/05/11/art-sqool-pc-switch-review/

I think it’s best to let Art Sqool explain itself.

“In ART SQOOL, you are Froshmin, and it’s your freshman year. Create art, explore the beautiful mysterious, sprawling campus and complete tasks given to you by the professor. The professor is a neural network an art-trained A.I., as well as your faculty advisor. He uses his high-tech capabilities to objectively grade your work. The campus is spread over a number of floating islands and filled with bizarrely shaped objects and bizarre plants.” – Official Description.

Art Sqool is meant to help inspire someone who wants to get into doing art to actually follow through by giving them both the tools and inspiration to start drawing. Unfortunately, it comes off as more of a mixed bag at best.

Let’s start with the visuals since it’s the thing that stands out the most. Frankly, I find this art style incredibly obnoxious. The entire game is bright pastel tones with the occasional flickering textures that could cause a migraine at the best of times, and I’m pretty sure might cause a seizure for someone. There’s no real variety in the visuals either, as you’re subjected to the same smallish area to explore.

Mixed with the quirky personality and music that I found incredibly grating, this is going to be the biggest hurdle for anyone wanting to try this out.

Once you’re in the game, you’re introduced to your professor, an A.I. who is going to judge your art, and the game does this by giving you random prompts for you to draw.

The prompts for what to draw are randomized, so no two playthroughs are the same. Due to the randomization, some of the prompts don’t end up making complete sense, such as one suggesting that you redraw something that you’ve previously dawn, but it’s ended up being the first prompt that you have. But this is a minor complaint at best.

After being introduced to the Professor and the concept for the game, you’re dropped into a small area to explore, which consists of the previously mentioned small floating islands. You can jump over to each of the islands by simply tapping the space bar (or whatever key is jump for you) repeatedly to get over to another one of the islands.

And this is where the game introduces the controls. At first I found the controls to be pretty clunky. I had trouble getting my character up some stairs because he was so sluggish and awkward to control, and the camera kept hitting objects in the environment. And having to repeatedly tap the key to make your character ‘fly’ can get pretty annoying pretty fast.

Thankfully there are multiple camera angles to choose from, such as third person being close or far to the character, first person, and isometric. A lot of these alternative camera angles work better to a certain extent, but there is still some clumsiness to the controls.

Another problem is that you have to unlock the various colors and tools for painting by walking around the ‘campus’ the find them. Apparently you can spend an extra $2.99USD on the Switch version to just unlock all of them up front, but that feels a tad scummy. I feel like if you’re trying to inspire people to follow their dreams of doing art, maybe you shouldn’t lock away features that might help with that process.

After drawing whatever the game has suggested to you, or drawing whatever your heart desires, you can either jump off into the void or walking into the buildings (I had trouble recognizing the entrance door to a few of these buildings the first couple of times), and get your painting graded by the A.I. professor.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason on how your art gets rated. Scores ranged from A (best) to F (immediate fail), and it feels like they were given out arbitrarily. Even a slight change or not even changing anything at all could change my grade from a failing one to a passing one and vice versa.

I feel like removing the failing grade would help a lot not only with making the game progress more smoothly, but if the game is trying to get me into art, maybe giving me a failing grade on something so subject as art might turn me off from the whole process. Maybe it’s just commentary on people thinking their subjective opinions are objective, who knows.

I guess the manual that came with the game is pretty neat, and is a short comic about the comic asking his friend about he controls which he jotted down in his notebook. But at this point it feels like I’m stretching a bit to find something to compliment about this game.

At $6.99, it feels like a steep ask for anyone who is on the fence, especially when the aesthetic might be a big turn off for a lot of people. If you’re looking for the inspiration to start finally following your dreams of becoming a professional artist, this might not be the place to start. You could probably go watch a few YouTube videos for free and get a much better experience.

(Adjusted from a review written in 2019 Feb)

 It's always nice to see Julian Glander's art on my social media feeds—it's charming, it looks great, and it's instantly recognizable and unique. I respect Glander a lot as an independent artist and content creator. I truly believe that artists like Glander keep art vibrant and alive in the Internet era, which is part of what makes writing this review so difficult. I generally don't like making heavy criticisms of these kinds of artists. But the monetization of one's work—which I wholeheartedly support—does, I feel, open creators up to a higher level of critique. ART SQOOL has Glander's signature aesthetic, the music is fairly great, and the humor is generally pretty good, but it falls short on gameplay—even approaching it as an experimental audiovisual experience.

 It's unfortunate that an art game billing itself as having "assignments generated & graded by an A.I." actually has "assignments graded arbitrarily with no regard for what you've drawn." Don't buy this under the impression that some program is going to actually analyze your art, because that certainly isn't the case. And that's unfortunate, because I feel that the branding of the game—the selling point, in fact—conveys the opposite. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't under the impression that it was actually some super-advanced AI that was going to analyze my work. But I was hoping that my work would, y'know, have at least some impact on the scoring, but that's not the case here.

 One could say that's an intentional dig at how academia tries to weigh subjective works on an objective scale, but there's nothing else to really suggest that's the case, so the interpretation seems generous. There was no real desire to actually carry out the prompts the game gave me once I realized that the "A.I." is actually just throwing out a random score. It's possible to see this when being handed a "D" or "F" grade—the professor sends you back out to campus to "try again," but a quick press of the undo button brings your old work back. This allows you to re-submit the same work for a potential passing grade. Sure, one could just do the prompts for one's own amusement, but they are often vague or difficult to the point of impossibility—usually as a joke. While the humor lands every once in a while, in time this just feels like a joke at the player's expense. "Here's a vague challenge, draw something random and hope the A.I. picks a good letter this time."

 One must also traverse the campus to find and unlock the various tools and colors. This is neat at first, but the world quickly reveals itself as empty with no interactivity. I actually became disinterested in finding all of the artist tools, and ended the game missing two of them. Finishing the game requires the player to complete several prompts, and once that's done, the player is unceremoniously brought right to the menu screen. No "you graduated ART SQOOL" or "you beat the game!" Attempting to continue the save will drop the player back into the campus world, but with no sketch pad or prompts. Sorry, no post-game free-draw mode. This wasn't the only gameplay issue I had, either—footstep noises continue as one "walks" through the air, and occasionally the player may spawn without a pad to draw on.

 There was the promise of something greater that was left unfulfilled in ART SQOOL—that, combined with some rough edges, on top of my rapidly deflated hype, really tore into me as the prompts continued. I really wanted this game to be one of those special little experiences, but ended up with a bit of buyer's remorse instead.

It's symbolic of actual art school: The main character has anxieties about what he's doing, the assignments are random and the judgement feels completely random at times. It's true to life. Fortunately, the assignment prompts never fail to entertain and make me think about what to draw. The game also saves every drawing you make in a folder, so you can view them at every time!
Just wish the game had a drawing focused mode that would go through all the prompts so you can take them all on.

But moving around to get supplies and navigating this world is really boring. Had it either cut that out or provided better movement options, navigating the dream-like world would have been actually worth doing. Not only that, but the game's camera is janky. It's not true to life because getting supplies and going from place to place in art school was the easy part.

On one half it's a true story idea executed in a silly way, and on the other half it's a slog to play. But if you think a game giving you drawing prompts is a fun idea like I did, you'll like this then.

I can't play this game anymore lol. The concept of doodling works just fine, but there are a lot of problems. The color scheme of the overworld is absolutely nauseating for one. The camera has a lot of problems too; the FoV is way too small (and there's no slider or way to adjust from what I can tell) so you're often uncomfortably close to your character, and the camera is way too sensitive and rotates a ton every time you try and mess with it. There's no map on the overworld to try and guide you when you need to submit assignments (I later learned that you can just fall off the overworld to auto-submit). There are more tools to work with so you can expand your doodling ability, but these tools all seem to be scattered between isolated isles, with no real way to travel between them except hopefully respawning randomly on the right isle. And finally, I have no idea how the scoring algorithm really works to get a gauge of how in tune this is. The concept is fine, but the lack of attention just about everywhere else is a huge problem.