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.

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.