Concrete Genie is perhaps the most honest collect-athon video game I have ever played.
This honesty makes me feel like a sucker. In one sloppy and unenthusiastic stroke of the developers’ brush, my tendency towards Trophy Completionism is spotlit and made a fool of by this game. This game, which attempts no meaningful follow-through on any of its core systems. This game, which presents a narrative experience better suited to the overflow shelves in the YA section of your local library than a years-labored-for multimedia product. This game, which only qualifies as such so far as it requires button inputs on a DualShock 4 controller to operate. This game, whose player-initiated verbs are not as varied or confident as a children’s book of color-by-numbers.
Allow me to explain: in Concrete Genie you control a boy with a big magical paintbrush. You use this paintbrush to paint on the walls of Concrete Genie’s seaside town environment. Holding the right trigger and wobbling around your accelerometer-equipped controller, you paint pictures, and you paint creatures; the titular Genies. These Genies, once painted, help you with various environmental tasks (fire Genies burn glowing red paper, electric Genies zap yellow voltage boxes, etc.). These tasks, when completed, reveal previously locked sections of the seaside town. Hanging from the walls of every building in this town are an interconnected series of string lights, as though the city beautification committee were headed up by a college freshman with a Pinterest-dictated shopping list. Paint these walls with your big paintbrush to light the lights to open gates, allowing further access to more walls to be painted. Repeat until you’ve run out of walls, or until the melatonin gummies kick in.
Additionally, there are glowing notebook pages floating around waiting to be walked into. When walked into, they offer you a new image to paint on walls, or a new cosmetic flourish for your Genie creations. Let not this chase towards glowing objects tempt you, though: It does not matter what you paint on the walls. No matter which image you choose, the lights still light. It does not matter what your Genies look like. No matter their appearance, they still complete their color-coded task.
The narrative expressed in Concrete Genie’s cutscenes gives us a little more reason to be painting these pictures and Genies everywhere: the boy with the brush is the victim of bullying. He is an artistic boy. He fondly remembers a more beautiful version of his town from his youth, before an oil spill and a whole lot of negative teenage energy dirtied up the place. The boy’s bullies tear apart his notebook of sketches, and paint Bad Graffiti all over the town. You must retrieve the pages, and put up Good Graffiti instead. You must revive the town with your art.
However, it does not matter what you paint on the walls. It does not matter what your Genies look like.
This is a problem.
Your paint action in Concrete Genie is not the kind of Super Mario Sunshine-meets-Kid Pix Deluxe experience you may be expecting, based on the concept of reviving this video game town with your art. You cannot actually paint whatever you’d like, not even in the game’s “free paint” mode. Instead, those pages you collect simply unlock new animated gifs for you to sticker onto the walls of the empty town. Your primary player interaction with everything in the world of Concrete Genie is to slap down stickers like you just blew a whole paycheck on Redbubble, and to wait for something to happen.
In order to get your Genie to do the elemental ability required to solve the puzzle you mentally pieced together minutes ago, you trigger-wobble-place the sticker gif they desire exactly where they desire it. If you were worried this might offer a little too much freedom, worry not; your Genies will tell you this placement information in loud graphic design, you can’t miss it. In order to light the town’s lights to check the progression box required to sticker down your next Genie, you trigger-wobble away using whatever your cursor autoselected on every wall of virtual string lights and wait for a little flash that says “you did it! now do it some more, idiot!”
Occasionally there are patches of wall that put a big red X over your trigger-wobble cursor. In order to sticker them down and light their lights you have to place more stickers exactly as demanded by the nearest Genie. After you do so, they will fill a meter which allows you to press a previously unused button, activating the ability to trigger-wobble-place even harder.
This is not creativity, and this is not a fun player action. This is routinely checking the exit billboards on I-94 in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There is no speed, there is no friction, there is only the slow crawl to your eventual off-ramp.
When Concrete Genie finally does reach its off-ramp, it has the decency to throw a few more verbs in the mix, but by then it's already too late. The addition of enemies to throw paint magic at and a dash ability are implemented in such a baffling way that they both don’t have enough time to make themselves interesting and they grow stale by the end of the game. The way Concrete Genie goes about pacing its final “boss encounters” is to make you tediously splash paint magic at multiple foes at once. This only makes for longer fights, not more interesting ones.
So, given its poor combat design in the end game and the utter lack of game in the paint mechanics, what is left? What is the player actually engaging with here?
The story? Well, maybe; I certainly won’t discount the possibility that Concrete Genie’s bog-standard anti-bullying story was compelling to someone, but it’s so immediately foreseeable and cliched that I’d imagine the age for real connection with its themes caps off at about ten years old. Besides, that story is only served to the player in cutscenes; it certainly does not work its way into the play experience in any meaningful way.
No, the player is compelled to continue by the completion percentage, of course. The upticking numbers next to each district of the town on your minimap are the real driving force here; that sweet ding of the regularly occurring trophy acquisition icon in the corner of the screen demands your further engagement. Because—look! You’re only a few away from that platinum! You might as well burn a few irreplaceable hours of life toiling after some odd digital item or another. Sticker down a couple different gifs in specific locations, and maybe you’ll see your little horned abominations do a special contextual dance that throws a bronze trophy your way. After all, that’s what you sick freaks with accounts on PSNProfiles dot com like to do, right?
It’s sort of ingenious, in a sense, that Concrete Genie lays out so nakedly the perversion of digital trophy hunting. I gave up on its superfluous extras after I glimpsed the freakish trick, and I still feel like a worse person for having played it. How many other games have successfully pulled the trick off, simply because they had a combat system just good enough to distract from my time being sold off by the hour? How many times have I been fooled by a game just slightly more confident in its narrative than Concrete Genie? How many times have I put off something magnificent, like Dragon Quest XI, Super Mario Odyssey, or heck, I dunno, reading Moby Dick; simply because I felt duty-bound to the mediocrity sitting on my Playstation’s hard drive? I like to think I have a lot of life still ahead of me, and those questions still scare me.
So; thank you, game development studio Pixelopus, for designing the game which would finally signal a Marie Kondo-adjacent change in my heart regarding game consumption. I couldn’t do this tidying up without you. And, apologies in advance, but I will not be playing your next game. I hope you understand.
This honesty makes me feel like a sucker. In one sloppy and unenthusiastic stroke of the developers’ brush, my tendency towards Trophy Completionism is spotlit and made a fool of by this game. This game, which attempts no meaningful follow-through on any of its core systems. This game, which presents a narrative experience better suited to the overflow shelves in the YA section of your local library than a years-labored-for multimedia product. This game, which only qualifies as such so far as it requires button inputs on a DualShock 4 controller to operate. This game, whose player-initiated verbs are not as varied or confident as a children’s book of color-by-numbers.
Allow me to explain: in Concrete Genie you control a boy with a big magical paintbrush. You use this paintbrush to paint on the walls of Concrete Genie’s seaside town environment. Holding the right trigger and wobbling around your accelerometer-equipped controller, you paint pictures, and you paint creatures; the titular Genies. These Genies, once painted, help you with various environmental tasks (fire Genies burn glowing red paper, electric Genies zap yellow voltage boxes, etc.). These tasks, when completed, reveal previously locked sections of the seaside town. Hanging from the walls of every building in this town are an interconnected series of string lights, as though the city beautification committee were headed up by a college freshman with a Pinterest-dictated shopping list. Paint these walls with your big paintbrush to light the lights to open gates, allowing further access to more walls to be painted. Repeat until you’ve run out of walls, or until the melatonin gummies kick in.
Additionally, there are glowing notebook pages floating around waiting to be walked into. When walked into, they offer you a new image to paint on walls, or a new cosmetic flourish for your Genie creations. Let not this chase towards glowing objects tempt you, though: It does not matter what you paint on the walls. No matter which image you choose, the lights still light. It does not matter what your Genies look like. No matter their appearance, they still complete their color-coded task.
The narrative expressed in Concrete Genie’s cutscenes gives us a little more reason to be painting these pictures and Genies everywhere: the boy with the brush is the victim of bullying. He is an artistic boy. He fondly remembers a more beautiful version of his town from his youth, before an oil spill and a whole lot of negative teenage energy dirtied up the place. The boy’s bullies tear apart his notebook of sketches, and paint Bad Graffiti all over the town. You must retrieve the pages, and put up Good Graffiti instead. You must revive the town with your art.
However, it does not matter what you paint on the walls. It does not matter what your Genies look like.
This is a problem.
Your paint action in Concrete Genie is not the kind of Super Mario Sunshine-meets-Kid Pix Deluxe experience you may be expecting, based on the concept of reviving this video game town with your art. You cannot actually paint whatever you’d like, not even in the game’s “free paint” mode. Instead, those pages you collect simply unlock new animated gifs for you to sticker onto the walls of the empty town. Your primary player interaction with everything in the world of Concrete Genie is to slap down stickers like you just blew a whole paycheck on Redbubble, and to wait for something to happen.
In order to get your Genie to do the elemental ability required to solve the puzzle you mentally pieced together minutes ago, you trigger-wobble-place the sticker gif they desire exactly where they desire it. If you were worried this might offer a little too much freedom, worry not; your Genies will tell you this placement information in loud graphic design, you can’t miss it. In order to light the town’s lights to check the progression box required to sticker down your next Genie, you trigger-wobble away using whatever your cursor autoselected on every wall of virtual string lights and wait for a little flash that says “you did it! now do it some more, idiot!”
Occasionally there are patches of wall that put a big red X over your trigger-wobble cursor. In order to sticker them down and light their lights you have to place more stickers exactly as demanded by the nearest Genie. After you do so, they will fill a meter which allows you to press a previously unused button, activating the ability to trigger-wobble-place even harder.
This is not creativity, and this is not a fun player action. This is routinely checking the exit billboards on I-94 in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There is no speed, there is no friction, there is only the slow crawl to your eventual off-ramp.
When Concrete Genie finally does reach its off-ramp, it has the decency to throw a few more verbs in the mix, but by then it's already too late. The addition of enemies to throw paint magic at and a dash ability are implemented in such a baffling way that they both don’t have enough time to make themselves interesting and they grow stale by the end of the game. The way Concrete Genie goes about pacing its final “boss encounters” is to make you tediously splash paint magic at multiple foes at once. This only makes for longer fights, not more interesting ones.
So, given its poor combat design in the end game and the utter lack of game in the paint mechanics, what is left? What is the player actually engaging with here?
The story? Well, maybe; I certainly won’t discount the possibility that Concrete Genie’s bog-standard anti-bullying story was compelling to someone, but it’s so immediately foreseeable and cliched that I’d imagine the age for real connection with its themes caps off at about ten years old. Besides, that story is only served to the player in cutscenes; it certainly does not work its way into the play experience in any meaningful way.
No, the player is compelled to continue by the completion percentage, of course. The upticking numbers next to each district of the town on your minimap are the real driving force here; that sweet ding of the regularly occurring trophy acquisition icon in the corner of the screen demands your further engagement. Because—look! You’re only a few away from that platinum! You might as well burn a few irreplaceable hours of life toiling after some odd digital item or another. Sticker down a couple different gifs in specific locations, and maybe you’ll see your little horned abominations do a special contextual dance that throws a bronze trophy your way. After all, that’s what you sick freaks with accounts on PSNProfiles dot com like to do, right?
It’s sort of ingenious, in a sense, that Concrete Genie lays out so nakedly the perversion of digital trophy hunting. I gave up on its superfluous extras after I glimpsed the freakish trick, and I still feel like a worse person for having played it. How many other games have successfully pulled the trick off, simply because they had a combat system just good enough to distract from my time being sold off by the hour? How many times have I been fooled by a game just slightly more confident in its narrative than Concrete Genie? How many times have I put off something magnificent, like Dragon Quest XI, Super Mario Odyssey, or heck, I dunno, reading Moby Dick; simply because I felt duty-bound to the mediocrity sitting on my Playstation’s hard drive? I like to think I have a lot of life still ahead of me, and those questions still scare me.
So; thank you, game development studio Pixelopus, for designing the game which would finally signal a Marie Kondo-adjacent change in my heart regarding game consumption. I couldn’t do this tidying up without you. And, apologies in advance, but I will not be playing your next game. I hope you understand.
JordanResin
2 years ago