Art Club Challenge: Gameplay Video and Impressions

Art Club Challenge
By: Polytundra LLC

As someone who minored in art in college, the idea of a game that tries to mimic an art class appealed to me. I like the concept, and it’s interesting how Polytundra’s Art Club Challenge forces you to use a very limited palette of four colors and only squares and rectangles to make your art. Unfortuantely, the execution isn’t quite as strong as the idea. It feels like it needs some polishing up before I spend more time with it. There’s a bug in the first story challenge that hasn’t been fixed yet. It asks you to make a wide and narrow rectangle, but if you make it too long, it won’t recognize the challenge as being completed. So you can get around that by making it shorter, but you need to know that. On top of that, the challenges are not really specific enough, and I’m often surprised when I do manage to complete them.

For instance, I was supposed to make a forest of trees and add “a number of tiny leaves.” I wasn’t sure how many I would need to consider it “a number” or how tiny they had to be, so I just messed around till it accepted my work. It didn’t feel very satisfying, though.

Then later, I had to make some old ruins made of red, and I was trying to make them somewhat decent, but it only accepted them when I placed some random red shape in a really odd placement on one of them. If I tried to remove that piece or make it look better, the game got fussy, so I left it as is.

I finally quit when it asked me to “add a few narrow books” to a bookshelf. I couldn’t tell what it meant by “narrow” or “a few” and I didn’t feel like guessing anymore.

I think there could be a decent game here with some work, but as is it feels too much like a guessing game, especially when I don’t know whether something is a bug or intentional. But you can watch my gameplay video below to see if it’s something you’d enjoy.

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