I wanted to like Concrete Genie more than I actually did. Most of the game is spent painting the environment. Though the juxtaposition between the bleak world you are trying to inject some life back into and the gorgeous art you create make for a satisfying visual treat, the amount of repetition and simplicity of the painting puzzles means that even in this short experience, I found it to get stale towards the end. However, the attention to detail the developers have put into things like the collectibles is a nice touch. Traversal is enjoyable, especially once you’ve unlocked all of your abilities by the latter stages of the game, and I liked how the genies which help you throughout your journey add some charm and character to the experience. However, the story itself is unengaging and seems to be there just to provide context to what you’re doing. Towards the end of the story the gameplay shifts to more of a combat emphasis, which while a welcome change in pace, is a bit hit and miss due to its rough edges.

I have been quite critical in this review because I feel like concrete genie could’ve been a really unique and memorable experience…and while it is unique, it just ends up being good. If you’re looking for a collectathon with a creative twist, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this game, but unfortunately I don’t think this experience is for everyone.

2019 Ranked

Status: Completed (Platinum Trophy)
Date: 01.18.2021 | Play Time: 8 hours

A fun, lighthearted collectathon that lets you be creative with an easy-to-use art template.
While most games structured like this will have you going around collecting a bunch of random stuff only to have the end reward be a costume or something, every collectible in Concrete Genie has a purpose.
I wanted to get every single page not because of the end reward, but because every page would unlock one more design in my art arsenal (artsenal). I’d find a wall I need to paint with some specific designs, so I’d take to the streets hunting for the pages so I could circle back and paint the wall only to see it come alive. It’s an incredibly satisfying collection loop.

What makes this process more fulfilling is that this dark, dingy, deserted fishing town completely comes to life with the colorful paintings you put everywhere. I would go out of my way to cover every single surface with art even if the game wasn’t asking me to do it. I wanted to see that place come alive, and the end result was very satisfying.

+ Extremely good collectible loop with great payoff
+ Great art system that lets you feel like you’re making cool art even if you aren’t an artist.
+ Fun, colorful visuals

- Surprise new mechanics at the end of the game felt a bit tacked on
- Motion controls are sometimes a bit finicky. But when you turn them off, it’s clear the game was designed with motion controls in mind.
- The bullies were occasionally annoying. Just leave me alone and let me paint.

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 game could have been much more with a different approach. The introduction of combat and sliding mechanic during the last part of the game felt really weird, probably a result of a rushed development. If all the combat mechanics were introduced earlier, this game could have been much, much better.

The gameplay style and animations reminded me of some PS2 era games. If someone told me that this is a Double Fine game from that era, I wouldn't have doubted that for a second.

Despite that, the game is still solid, fun and worth a playthrough. I 100% the game in a day, so it is a short experience, keep that in mind.

I do not have a single artistic bone in my body, and I say forthright that I would probably not have picked up this quaint indie game were it not for the fact it is free this month for PSN users. This circumvention of the rather steep £30 tag coupled with the fact I went in with no expectations likely makes me more lenient on reviewing this.

Nevertheless I enjoyed this for what it was, a heavily stylised and cartoonish little drawing game where you use your controller to draw (preset) neon monsters on walls and decorate them with (preset) tails, ears, hats and various other little bits to try to breathe life into these otherwise characterless creatures. But there lies perhaps the biggest problem (and surely the most grating for the artists), the fact there are many restrictions to what you can paint. Yes you can draw cute landscapes on just about every wall and theres a good amount of natural objects to choose from, but even if you manage to wrangle your controller into the shape you want these objects to take on the wall, by the time you’re done it still looks more like a great neon mess than anything resembling the natural world. The same is true for the aforementioned genies, as although there are numerous customisation options for you to drunkenly play ‘pin-the-tail-on the-genie’, the difficulty in making it look the way you want combined with the brief time you most likely will spend with these individuals before they become lumped together in your genie puzzle-solving army makes most efforts to make them standout futile (the most artistic genie I made was one with 8 gargantuan spider legs jutting out of its body, something I quickly altered after the first time I saw him bounding towards me at record speeds), in this sense they are much akin to the messy environmental drawings, just with a friendlier face. As mentioned, there are puzzles in this game that have to be solved to progress, although these puzzles amount to little more than ‘call the genie over and draw stuff for it’. The combat system they introduce is similarly simple and limiting, equating to little more than periodic button-pressing.

I had no qualms about the overarching story, yes it was simple and cliche, but it was done in a well enough way that I didn’t really mind. And how it incorporates a great change up in gameplay during the last chapter is quite well done too, making it feel truly like a final push against the ‘Darkness’. The world that this story takes place in is also an intriguing one, a forgotten fishing village enveloped by an unknown evil sets an effectively eerie atmosphere from the start, making all the more incentive to ‘paint the town back to life’ as standing back and witnessing some of the light you have brought back to Denska really helps to carry motivation for seeing out the story. Although the short completion time of this, even if you go for Platinum, stops most of the gameplay and story aspects from really shining.

All-in-all a unique little indie title doesn’t quite justify its £30 price tag due to all the limits it imposes on the players creativity. Still for the price of free you could do a lot worse and you’re bound to get some forgettable fun out of this.

Certainly not a complete waste of time but nonetheless a chore to get through. Can’t call this outright bad because the chief concept is novel enough and it’s executed with sufficient earnest panache that I found myself pleasantly amused by it at times. The art direction is pretty and the characters and “genies” charming enough to at least get through the story but the second I saw this relied on motion controls I switched that shit to manual and prayed the choppiness of the gameplay let up (which it didn’t lol). This might just be a case of me not being the intended player base however for this being a free PS+ title, I can’t complain too much.

This game was available on the PS Plus pass, and I took a chance on it. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. This game has a ton of heart, and a brilliant idea to it! It's a simple puzzle game where you can paint on the walls and those paintings come to life. It shows that joy can still be found in darker places, especially when we come together as a community. The game is only about 6 hours long, but I found myself grinning like a kid the entire time. The controls are a bit janky but it didn't deter me from playing. I definitely recommend it!

This game offers a short but sweet experience that ultimately left me satisfied even though I think the last third of the game could have been handled better gameplay-wise.

The core gameplay consisting of painting on all the walls of the little town, a bit of platforming and solving rather easy puzzles with your genie friends is fun throughout. It is not meant to be challenging, the focus lies in the imagination of the protagonist and his - and your - creative work in filling the world with colorful flowers, rainbows, trees,… and monsters, called 'genies'. These cute little guys act as animated NPCs that can move along the walls around the town. They are necessary to solve puzzles, but are more importantly the lonely protagonist’s friends, and their purpose is strongly tied to the narrative. Their cute, caring or funny behaviour and the fact that they can interact with your paintings make them very endearing and are big factor in making the world you create feel alive.

While you’re having a pretty free hand in designing the monsters, I wish that would also apply to the scenery. I realise that the scope of the game and the dev team doesn’t allow for a huge amount of different things to paint, but it would have been nice to customize what ended up being in the game more, e.g. changing colors/color palettes. And while you are collecting more blueprints along the way, the last few don’t offer much variety in colour because they were snow/ice themed. It also would have been better if the last third of the game weren’t action-oriented and instead would have stuck with or elaborated on the painting or monster interactivity mechanic.

Nevertheless, the art style and atmosphere are gorgeous and I think that the game achieved what it set out to do overall, creating a sweet, cozy and (mostly) relaxing experience with its gameplay and story. I would be happy about a more consistent sequel that could further improve the player’s own creative freedom and the 'liveliness' of the paintings.

I’ve not played a game so childish (in the best way possible) as Concrete Genie in a long while. The game seems to be built both in gameplay and narrative to serve as an early video game for children—the bullying message is appropriate if a bit shallow, and the gameplay direction is clearly marked at all times on the in-game mini-map, leaving very little puzzle-solving. This amounted to the game being a bit more mindless of an exercise than I would like from a video game. Even so, the game presented a charming 3-4 hour story, and I intend to return for the Platinum trophy. Edit Platinum Trophy took an additional hour and 15 minutes.

While much has been made of the game’s bullying message, the most impactful message it holds for its older audience actually regards the artist at the game’s center, Ash, as he discovers the vocation of an artist. His kind heart, meek demeanor, and social isolation clearly play into Western stereotypes of the “artist type,” yet the game has a much more nuanced take on the craft itself, especially on the cycle of art influencing people and people influencing art.

Beyond the narrative, the game is just a freaking delight to play—light and darkness are not conversational metaphors, but lived realities in this game’s beautiful world.

The only things that holds Concrete Genie back from brilliance are a few annoying design issues: too-close button prompt distances, jumbled artwork, and unclear hit-boxes all hampered my play through. Unfortunately, these issues are persistent through much of the game and interrupted my enjoyment often, even if only in small ways.

If you are looking for a short, heart-warming, and beautiful game for a rainy afternoon, I heartily recommend Concrete Genie.

I did enjoy Concrete Genie as a whole! I enjoyed the messaging, the simplicity of it at times, and the artistic freedom it gives the player! Though, it did feel clunky at times and was difficult to control the brush with the DualSense to get some things just right.

The environments were interesting in terms of telling a story of how the town of Denska has evolved from a beautiful place, to a place of gloom.

I am torn between a 3.5 and a 4, but I enjoyed Concrete Genie overall! Just some polish could've been done, or implementing the Move controller, but that is a difficult requirement for one game. The inclusion of the VR Mode I'm sure helps this, but then I would imagine you lose the connection you have to Ash, the main character.

(Review from 2021)

A short narrative driven game that focused on a child that's being bullied.

This was right up my alley. I loved how creative you could get with the different painting mechanics and it was just short enough that it never outstayed it's welcome.

Oh and don't sleep on the VR mode. It's surprising cool.