Avert Your Eyes From My Masterpiece

Last year I briefly flirted with the ambition to learn to watercolor paint, after too many social media videos made it look cute and appealing. For me, it was neither of those things: I produced some muddy bits of paper and one child’s drawing of a sun before stashing my paints and brushes away in shame. Sloppy Forgeriesis that experience in video game form.

Sloppy Forgeriescomes out in November, and has a demo live now on Steam. It’s a competitive painting game that can be played single-player, local multiplayer, or online with friends, where you have a set amount of time to copy famous paintings. At the end, you’re scored on how accurately you recreated your target.

You unlock new paintings as you play, but I have yet to unlock anything beyond the entry level ones available in single-player, both of which I didn’t just fail but failed spectacularly. I failed them so hard you’d think I was tryingto fail them, but I wasn’t: I really did try my best to match what seemed like the easy swatches of color and lines before me. But it’s hard to paint with a mouse (especially for me because I’m left-handed), and while the game has some helpful tools like a time-limited grid that can help you match sections, the pressure to be accurate block-by-block was way too stressful for me. So I employed the losing strategy of just eyeballing things and then winging it, with predictably disastrous results.

The game is probably delightful in multiplayer, where you could laugh along with a friend as you both fumble along; played alone, I couldn’t help but shout “What are you doing?” at myself in exasperation. It doesn’t help that you can’t undo your mistakes, though you have the ability to slap white paint over them. The combined requirements of speed and accuracy, set against the limits of how much you can do (or, well, Ican do) in a knockoff MS Paint, especially if you aren’t naturally an artist, makes the game challenging but also a kind of ridiculous fun.

I seriously debated not writing this blog because I’m so embarrassed by what I’ve done here, but if I can’t be praised for my artistic abilities, I can at least be praised for my courage in the face of public humiliation. Sloppy Forgerieshas a release date of November 13.