This painted Yume Nikki has it's moments, but I really feel it doesn't go far enough in adapting the art pieces or creating an experience of more or even equal value to just looking through the picture gallery at the end, which to me was the best part. I've played through several interactive art galleries, (Kid A/Mnesia, Mango, Fuzz Dungeon, Hypnagogia) that embody their interactivity either through bringing gaming conventions to the gallery or playing it safe as a walking simulator. Cuccchi choses to be the worst type of walking simulator, an often intangible labyrinth, meaning I was spending more time focused on my objective than getting immersed. In terms of narrative, I don't know what it was trying to do other than look weird and be a walking tour of Cucchi's general motifs. There's a feeling of innocence, isolation and possibly sickness to the worlds Enzo Cucchi creates, based on what I've seen from the actual paintings. While the soundscape is incredibly artistic in it's own right, the gaminess and aimlessness unfortunately actively detract from translating the art in a meaningful way.

Nonostante alcuni elementi, come per esempio la musica e il gameplay stesso, siano contro la logica di un gioco del genere penso che sia un buon lavoro. Le parti labirintiche potevano anche andare bene, stare dentro il quadro è sempre una buona idea, ma il volerlo rendere più in un certo senso videoludico mettendo i teschi è stato più un autogol che altro. Anche la musica, per quanto non meritevole di particolari critiche, più che accompagnare nell'esplorazione dell'arte di Cucchi alimenta l'aspetto più videoludico allontanando dal punto apparentemente centrale dell'opera. Peccato, perchè l'idea è ottima, e come dice qualcuno nelle recensioni se l'autore credesse maggiormente in quello che fa probabilmente non avrebbe pensato a rendere questo gioco più digeribile. Metto 3 ma mi spiace, avrei voluto dare di più

ENG: I'll be frank: I didn't know who Enzo Cucchi was at the time of playing Cuccchi. I did some research about him, I saw his works, and if I have to highlight something about this game is how he translates the painting to what would be the gameplay. That is to say, painting is a static, flat, still thing and what Cuccchi does is to translate the aesthetics of Enzo Cucchi's works to the videogame adding depth, perspective changes and, obviously, interactivity.

I see many people commenting on the unnecessaryness of the life system, which manifests itself with skull-shaped enemies, and the collection of objects, which does the same with eyes. From all of the above, it would seem that there is a lack of confidence on the part of the game. But I disagree. It turns out that, in the course of this very picturesque adventure, there is a clear sense of "invasion" of part of the city. Trains, ships, smoke, darkness stain the countryside, nature and greenery. I think those skulls would be the debris of such an attack. While the eyes we collect would symbolize vitality.

ESP: Voy a ser franco: no sabía quien era Enzo Cucchi al momento de jugar Cuccchi. Investigué un poco sobre él, vi sus obras, y si tengo que destacar algo de este juego es el como traduce la pintura a lo que sería la jugabilidad. Es decir, la pintura es una cosa estática, plana, quieta y lo que Cuccchi hace es traducir la estética de las obras de Enzo Cucchi al videojuego agregándole profundidad, cambios de perspectivas y, obviamente, la interactividad.

Veo que se comenta en muchas partes lo innecesario del sistema de vidas, que se manifiesta con unos enemigos en forma de calavera, y de la recolección de objetos que hace lo propio con unos ojos. Por todo lo anterior, pareciera que existe una falta de confianza de parte del juego. Pero no estoy de acuerdo. Resulta que, en el transcurso de esta aventura tan pintoresca, hay una clara sensación de "invasión" de parte de la ciudad. Los trenes, los barcos, el humo, la oscuridad manchan al campo, a la naturaleza y al verde. Creo que esas calaveras vendrían a ser los escombros de tal ataque. Mientras que los ojos que recolectemos simbolizarían la vitalidad.

Adapting art, aside from narrative, across different mediums looks impossible due to how difficult it is to translate form. On the other hand, dreams fit well with videogames, both with logic as a supplement in any way imaginable. So how is it to adapt the paintings of a dreamy author? Does it have any value to do that?

The biggest merit of the game is giving a new perspective on an artist and his work. Googling Enzo Cucchi works gives a confusing image. Various paintings randomly ordered appear without much guidance, and it’s a bit hard to dig beyond the surface. But the selective work of Cuccchi gives a deeper interpretation of those works.

Natural and rural life predominate the sceneries and provide vitality through the color they irradiate. Curiously, in contraposition, mechanical appearings seem the antithesis to this. In the most obvious example, the village that is visited some times in the first minutes loses its color at the moment that trains, boats and tanks begin to appear. After that, there is a pattern where everytime we encounter some of this mechanical presence the world will be weirdly monochrome, the colors that before inspired life now suggest death.

With the way the works are presented the fear of a world dying is obvious, and because of that the last level is surprising yet still coherent. After all that we see, we encounter ourselves in a map where plants are uncolored and there is a red swamp with fish dying, following the thematic line. But this last map has the colors surrounding everything like in a fog, less attached from the physical world. The only places where color returns to nature is where humans are present, people wearing straw hats reminiscent of the rural people, just being there. An encapsulated paradise in a way, but a paradise that is dying, a paradise where every person is trapped under a web right above them.

I still think that Julián Palacios should trust more in his own games. The already dreamy power aesthetic of the Windows maze wallpaper is a good canvas to paint Cucchi’s work into. You don’t need eyes to collect or skulls to avoid. But given that this is a minor complaint in a game that can convey such an understanding of a surrealist painter, I can give it a pass.

Despite being an artist myself for most of my life, I actually have never heard of or have ever seen Enzo Cucchi's art. This feels a little blasphemous as he seems kind of important. On the other hand, I got to experience this nice little homage to his work in isolation, so I suppose its not all that bad.

Cuccchi is a slow-paced and surreal walk through Enzo Cucchi's repertoire of art. Endlessly colorful, every pixel trying its damnedest to replicate the texture and implications of the original piece it's based on. Managing to intertwine several seemingly unrelated works to create an area that makes cohesive sense replicates the feeling of walking around an art exhibit, albeit a kind of stressful one.

Ive seen a lot of reviews on this game mention that, because the game is not linear, it was frustrating trying to find a path to the next area. I can sort of understand, but the game itself is so small you would have to really miss the mark to end up wandering around lost for that long. The unique experience of traversing different worlds of someone's art rather than a more gallery-like exhibit is what makes this game special.

It is a little bit too stressful, though. Looking for the eye collectables so I could unlock the actual images of Enzo's art kept me from fully being immersed in what I was seeing. And there were one too many mazes, the ideal number of mazes in any given video game being 0. And I used to think that a video game could never make me motion sick, but wow, Cuccchi put me in my place there. With the environments constantly shifting and there being no floor or ceiling to ground my eyes to, I did feel on the edge of having to turn the game off a few times. The point is to be dreamlike, and maybe its alright that some games make you have to close your eyes every 10 seconds to get through it, but the stress of having to look out for collectables + the weird motion made this a less enjoyable experience than it could of been for me.

Overall, Enzo Cucchi makes kind of scary and beautiful art and I feel as though the game did a great job showcasing that. Lots of ships and houses and melty faces. If you dont mind a little motion sickness, I would definitely recommend checking it out. Italian artists are still very threatening to me.

If you can't make video games into art, make art into video games...
I have long held the opinion that the vast majority of video games are toys you play with while shoving popcorn in your face, the likes of a James Cameron film at best and degenerate slush at worst. Little throwaway experiences that aren't worth thinking about beyond liking or disliking the time you spent with them. "Not art," if you will (not that Cameron films "aren't art," Avatar rules). Cuccchi didn't make me completely reconsider that opinion per se, I do still think most of the medium doesn't deserve the merit it's given, but it did show me how silly and shallow it is to try and define capital A Art.

Describing Cuccchi is difficult. An interactive tribute to Enzo Cucchi? An arthouse first-person adventure game? To try and encapsulate it is to miss the point entirely, but you have to convey some sort of idea to your friend who you’re begging to play it. Still, I don’t really care to. I had no formal introduction, just a feeling that I wanted to see what exactly was going on. Cuccchi fell into my lap while perusing the eShop recent releases tab one day, the cover was intriguing so I decided to check it out. I had no clue about the experience I was about to have, the world that was about to be unveiled to me.

If you've never heard of Enzo Cucchi (I hadn't before playing) that's ok, the game is a phenomenal introduction to his work. You are thrusted into an explorable space with little direction, all of its mechanics are left for you to make sense of. I can see how some are turned off by this, your set lives and unclear enemies can feel frustrating at first. Cuccchi is not your run-of-the-mill DevolvApurna “prestige” indie game, it often feels unconcerned with your understanding or enjoyment of the experience. But just because it feels careless doesn’t mean it is, so much love and detail is poured into the game, its adoration of the semi-titular artist is clear (and infectious). I admire Cuccchi’s trust in you to figure it out, the enemies add a sense of looming risk while meandering through its worlds, further explanation would distract. Why explore a painting if you can’t feel its living presence?

Like many I loathe the term “liminal space,” at this point it’s a label slapped onto any eerie uninhabited built environment. I’ll spare you the whole define-a-word-for-emphasis shtick and just say Cuccchi frequently occupies the liminal. A hazy forest fades into a corn stalk labyrinth. A slurry of hailing brushstrokes becomes a small farmstead. Despite its leveled structure your traversal is never halted, your playthrough is essentially one long transition. One way in and one way out, Cuccchi is fundamentally an art exhibit, one unlike anything you’ll ever experience.

Upon finishing the game for the first time (a nearly effortless task, it can be seen in as little as 45 minutes) I realized my previous notions of the medium had been directly challenged. Here was an experience that impacted me as much as my first trip to an art museum. I was actively feeling my horizons being broadened, my black-and-white outlook growing grayer. Cuccchi was an instrumental work in growing my late-teenage art nuance (LTAN, I like to call it, patent pending), comparable with Duchamp’s “Fountain” in that it points out the frivolity of categorizing art from not-art. Sure, anything can be art, but is it even worth discerning? I have played this game four times and hope to play it hundreds more, my gratitude to the devs and to Cucchi himself is infinite. If you want something more out of video games, something that blurs the line between physical and digital mediums, Cuccchi will be here- waiting to show you a space you never knew existed.

I've been to a lot of museums since covid "ended". It's interesting to see how they've all spent the two-year timeskip adapting and updating their layouts to accommodate for the wants and needs of the 2020s, fighting to stay relevant in a world where you can type "Cezanne" into your phone and have a gallery in your hand within seconds. Regardless of whether you visit a portrait gallery or a modern art space, there seems to be a universal focus on "Instagrammable" moments: extending art beyond the frame and allowing it to occupy enough physical space for a cool selfie or 15-second clip that you can cryptically share with the internet to increase your various clout scores. I'm not opposed to the idea, really - museums have to evolve or die, and I've seen creative takes on Van Gogh and Picasso pieces that are probably helping people think about those artists in ways they can relate to and understand in the present. But it is very funny that the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art has an "Instagram usher" whose sole job is to stop people turning Basquiat light shows into their own personal photo studio, perhaps belying the fact that some people aren't necessarily there to look at anything but themselves.

My favourite of these new installations is probably FRIDA KAHLO: The life of an icon at the Centre d'Arts Digitals. (Funny that every clip of the exhibition has someone taking photos with their phone, right?) It's essentially just a massive warehouse full of projectors and props, but it serves as a fusion reactor for a number of digital artforms, combining huge images, CGI, music, soundscapes and physical space to tell the life story of Frida Kahlo and her work in a more immediately relatable way than going up to description plates next to a glass-protected painting in a big old hall and "hmmmmm"ing to yourself about dates and times and names; by walking down halls and seeing light-life form and respond to your movement, you get a chance to walk in step with the artist in a whole new way.

The problem with these installations, of course, is that you need to be in the one particular spot on the planet where they're happening in order for them to work. You can't study them from the comfort of your home as you could a photograph of a painting or sculpture or video. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, an installation similar to Frida's, was meant to happen in London last year - but it had to be called off due to the continuing complications of covid. The creative solution to that problem was for Radiohead to partner up with Epic Games and recreate the installation as a "video game" you could download from the same place you get Fortnite and Rocket League - perhaps not a museum space your parents would visit, but regardless I think it's fair to say this digital alternative was a success, a new kind of experience that people would like to feel more of.

Cuccchi is another such experience, and it's interesting in so far as it's basically the same thing as KID A but for a physical space that has never existed. Step through Enzo Cucchi's art in a new kind of "high-fidelity", a whirlwind gallery that makes the paint move on your behalf and infers meaning through smart music cues. ("Why aren't you painting? To me, this scene is beyond belief!") Unsurprised to see VGV make a personal cameo here - it's fair to say a lot of this exhibition takes inspiration from paintings like The Starry Night and Wheat Field with Cypresses, to the point where I felt like Marty Scorsese in those plains of wheat. Borders on trascendent, but there were a few moments where I found myself bumping up against invisible walls that broke my flow - ever had that happen at a museum? The inclusion of annoying little ghosts and skulls who can damage you was hardly welcome, either - imagine you went to the Picasso Museum and there were dudes chasing you around with pointy sticks while you were trying to look at the paintings, a dream and someone turned it into a nightmare! The National Portrait Gallery on "Ultra-Violence" difficulty?! No thank you! Although there's a novelty to visiting the world's first museum with a Hard Mode, I recommend playing this on the setting where you can't take damage.

Fills me with a rare feeling. I've played a lot of games in my time - far too many, if I'll be honest. I often find myself playing something others laud as a groundbreaking new exploration of genre or visuals where it only leaves me thinking I'm experiencing deja vu. Cuccchi is one of the recent cases of me playing a modern game and it feeling genuinely otherworldly. Visually, this is unparalleled, I've never seen anything else like it. Even on replays, I find myself stopping in my tracks, just to pan the camera around and absorb what I'm being presented, both to take in its beauty, and to try to understand its composition.
I am so hungry for the further exploration of games as vehicles for concept albums, digital museums or virtual mausoleums.

Cucchi is Intensely reverent of an artist I'd otherwise never heard of; Enzo Cucchi (pronounced "cookie"). His artwork is wonderfully realised, riding the wave of expressionism and shaking its own visual conventions with surprising regularity. Something about the low-resolution rendering direction somehow lends every scene from every angle a genuinely painterly feel. The music is astounding too, remarkably reactive to the player's position in the world.
So naturally, the catch is that it has a certain lack of confidence in itself. One of the central mechanical pillars of the game is the task of finding collectables and avoiding enemy skulls in Windows 95 maze screensaver-esque sequences. The levels themselves are peppered with unlockable artworks by Enzo for you to later inspect via a submenu, which adds some annoying blemishes to the landscapes. No reason for any of this to be here at all, I'll be frank, just because you're a game doesn't mean you have to carry the baggage of one. The heart and soul of the Cuccchi is the exploration of sight and sound, that's all it needed.

The game has recently received an update that adds a few more levels and songs to what was present at the time of writing, as well as a difficulty setting modifier you can use to outright remove the enemies! Sadly, the maze segments remain - and with a distracting sense of emptiness if you choose to remove the hostile annoyances. An imperfect solution, but it's nice that the experience can be tuned none the less.

Gioco italiano partorito da Fantastico Studio e da Julián Palacios Gechtman (membro del collettivo milanese Eremo e autore di Promesa, uscito giusto l'anno scorso). Ne risulta un mix tra l'esplorazione e il maze-game in ambienti realizzati sulla base delle opere di Enzo Cucchi. Scopo del giocatore è quello di trovare i dipinti di Cucchi (51 in tutto), operazione che permette di sbloccare le tele nella libreria del Menù d'avvio. Ritengo poco azzeccata la scelta di rendere meno libera l'esplorazione attraverso il collocamento di teschi (a loro volta ispirati a quelli realizzati da Cucchi stesso) che inseguono il giocatore all'interno dei livelli con labirinti: entrare in contatto con uno di essi porta alla perdita di uno dei dipinti che sono stati raccolti in quel livello, costringendo il giocatore che voglia ottenerli tutti a ripeterlo (e l'esperienza di gioco non rende interessante il rigiocare i vari livelli). Diversi degli elementi nei vari livelli sono animati in modo tale da restituire una certa vivacità alla scena, senza eccessi.