[REVIEW] Passpartout: the Starving Artist

 If you’re into art, you might recognize the term passe-partout as meaning a picture mounted between a piece of glass in front and just a thin sheet of cardboard in the back. A mat, or a mount, basically, so that the piece your displaying stays flat and straight and in good condition. Passpartout, however, is a game that drops the e and lets you go to town and experiment with the fun and exciting world of selling your art to hipsters and collectors alike!

 Developed and published by Flamebait Games in 2017, Passpartout: the Starving Artist is a fun indie game you might have seen YouTube gamers play around with a while back, showing off their art skills (or lack thereof) for in-game profit. The idea of the game is that you’re a starving artist, trying to make your way in the Paris art scene, and wow, could you ever have chosen a rougher gig to break into! The game is, at its heart, a painting sim, with a touch of resource management along the way. But just a very light touch. You have to sell enough art to cover your weekly expenses, after all. You have rent to pay and baguettes to eat, because France!

THIS GAME TINGLES MY FACIAL HAIRS!

You start out as a street artist, sleeping on a mattress in a garage, your display tables nothing but cheap folding tables with a couple of bricks on them to drop your paintings against. Inside the garage is your canvas, and this is where you’ll spend the bulk of the game. Not mixing and mingling with fans of your works, but feverishly paining away at that canvas, trying to create what you can in order to sell the passersby.

It’s a really neat concept, because you actually do create pictures to sell. The canvas allows you a decent range of colours and shades to use, and your starting tool — a paintbrush — is sufficient for your early needs, letting you pain thin lines or thick swathes of colour across your digital canvas. As you sell more and move up in the world of art, you unlock more tools: spraypaint, and a stabilizer pen, which allows you finer control over where your lines go. Useful for some things, but I found myself not bothering with it that much since careful movements would give me almost the same effect with the paintbrush.

After a while I began to wish that instead of pre-selected colours, I had something more akin to a colour wheel, where I could choose the exact shade of what I needed rather than using a preselect. It made some painting more difficult to do according to what I had in mind, and yes, I know that’s a piddling concern, but it was part of my experience with the game, and so I think it bears mentioning. The preselects are good, but they do limit what you can create: you may have a blank canvas in front of you, but you’re limited in what you can put upon it.

Which makes sense in the beginning, I think, since it mimics only being able to afford a certain number of paints in your impoverished state, but by the time I’ve moved up to a high-rise studio, you’d think I’d be able to buy a few more shades of green.

THE CRITIC IS COMING

 
Once your paintings are complete, you name them and display them, and then interested parties will offer you money. You don’t get to set the prices, but you can reject offers if you feel they’re too low, or haggle for slightly higher amounts, something that becomes easier when you gain some reputation in the art scene.

You’d think that the best thing to do would be to bang out some quick paintings, one after the other, taking as little time and effort on each in order to make a quick buck. But the game has a secret: the longer you take on a painting, the more people will offer you for it. Now, you still have to work within the perceived budget of the people you’re selling to (It’s not too likely any of the spiky-haired people in the beginning will be able to drop $10k on your masterpiece), but interestingly, the game teaches a valuable lesson about selling to your audience.

Quicker expressive pieces with bold colours will sell well to said spiky-haired people, but Paris’s nobility, for instance, will want something a bit more careful, with more time and effort taken in its creation. True, that might not be the art you want to create, but Passpartout isn’t just a game about making art. It’s a game about making and selling art. You can make all the paintings you want, but if what you’re making doesn’t appeal to people in some manner, it’s not going to sell, you’re not going to be able to pay your bills, and your career as a self-sufficient artist is over. It’s a hard lesson, and one that a lot of real-life artists struggle with. Where’s the line between making what you want to make and making what you know will sell? Being a self-supporting artist means confronting that question.

Now, you don’t have to advance in the art world. You can, if you want, just stick around in your garage for the rest of your days, selling things to punks and hipsters (though the hipsters don’t like it when you become too popular), if that’s what you want to do. Every so often, when you become popular enough from selling your work, an art critic will come by, examine a piece you have on display (not always the piece you want him to look at, though, which is supremely frustrating), and make a judgment on you. If your art good enough to be called art by the strict standards of a Paris art critic? If it is, you can move to the next stage of the game. Same supplies, same canvas, but a better studio and with more affluent and influential clientele.

But the thing is, you don’t have to. You can just be like, “Nah, dude, I’m cool staying where I am,” and doing so, continuing on as you had been. Passpartout leaves that up to you. It lets you, as the artist, decide how far through the art scene you want to go. Do you want to have your work hanging in museums and in the homes of the rich, or are you cool sticking around in your garage and selling to random people on the street?

 
Passpartout may be simple in its scope and execution, but it’s a game that you can play for hours on end, not noticing the passage of time as you paint away at your canvas, putting a finished piece for sale and then immediately going back to your easel with a mumble of, “Ooh, I just had another idea for a painting.” It’s expressive and creative, and gives you a taste of a challenging career to advance in without any risk. It’s a game created to let the player create, and I really admire what the developers put into it to make it such an enjoyable experience.

If you’re curious, the most money I ever made on a piece as I played through the game was a little over $16,000, for something that was essentially blobs of colour neatly outlined in black. It took over 15 minutes to create, piece by little piece, and in the end, even though I spent multiple in-game weeks selling absolutely nothing while I made this piece de resistance, it was worth it in the end!

(I’d show it off, but for some weird reason I can’t find half the screenshots I took through Steam, so I guess that one’s lost to the ages. :/)