Sometimes its a games theme rather than its moment-to-moment gameplay that makes it stand out from the crowd. That’s how I feel having enjoyed my time with Art Reborn: Painting Connoisseur. It is one of my most luxuriously different takes on a match 3 game to the point where it doesn’t feel like you are playing a match 3 game at all. That’s because the game focuses you entirely around a single question: what does art mean to you?
Art Reborn has a three part gameplay loop. The first part involves buying and tagging artwork for the art gallery you’ve taken over from your dying father. He was well established in the art world but as you aren’t artistic, you lack vision to really create an art gallery experience that sells well. This means you’ll be buying painting from various different eras that are replicas of originals. Each piece of art can be viewed full screen and comes with a blurb like a mini Wikipedia about it. Underneath the info is a tagging system with 6 correct tags to choose from out of 10. They’ll relate to style, composition, era, artist and the general mood or message. Tagging paintings isn’t essential but it really helps for the main part of the story, which will see you visit 35 other galleries to sell art and learn the meaning of the curators view of art.
Each museum has a distinct artistic era and curator desire which helps you choose what art to buy from the first stage of gameplay and then the art to take to the gallery to sell. Once at a gallery you’ll be presented with a 3×3 grid and a certain amount of turns to make as much money or regenerate as much health as possible. You can do this by answering quiz questions on the artwork in the game, but you’ll spend most of your time in the gallery with guests or VIP guests. This is where the match 3 element comes in. All your artworks you’ve taken into the gallery are randomly lined up (with many duplicates) at the bottom of the screen and its up to you to decide which art to wave under the guests nose to make them part with their money. Each guest will give you a hint about what they like in a piece of art and its up to you to select the best matching art to increase their happiness meter so that they buy something. Each guest also has a Muccy – a painting that is their exact definition of art. If you take that into battle and choose it then its a one move win outright. Duplicate artwork or works from the same artist that are clumped together are more powerful than individual works too so you’ll spend your 9 moves trying to work out what brings in the dosh. There are three hearts for each guest which correlate to the tag system mentioned earlier and that’s why its helpful to invest time tagging artwork upfront.
Once you’ve completed the initial rounds, you’ll have the same gallery battle again with the curator. These are harder to crack but also have more moves and you can spend lives dragging yourself over the finish line if you’ve just not got the right artwork to flaunt. This then leads to a story about the curators Muccy and their offering of what art means to them. Then off we go to the next gallery with our dosh to buy more paintings and repeat the cycle.
Initially I was really enjoying the gameplay loop because there is over 200 paintings here and you can map them out in a timeline or star constellation to see how art evolved over centuries. You can also drop art into your own gallery and that makes yours more powerful as duplicate purchases level up the frame to a golden one that adds extra clout. However the more art you buy, the easier the game becomes as you start to notice the same cues and clues appearing over and over again. This in turn made me want to speed through the final third of the game to reach the story sections because listening to different perspectives on what makes something artistic was genuinely interesting. Your friend and painter thinks success is purely about how much the piece sells for but all the curators have varied and different ideas. Its really well done and I didn’t expect the story to be what charmed me the most.
Once Art Reborn revealed itself as a quite basic but very beautiful match 3 game where your odds of success get better over time, the gameplay element became a little stale by the end. However if you are a fan of art through the ages, or are looking for an unusually themed casual game – Art Reborn is a good recommendation. Interestingly, the developers have announced they are turning this into a board game so I’ll be curious to see how that translates over. For me, its not the gameplay that shines here, its everything else wrapped around it. An enjoyable ride, best played in short bursts.
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