Alive Paint – PS5 Review

Alive Paint is an art utility/game from the mysteriously named solo developer KhudO and it comes to us by way of the ever-prolific publisher eastasiasoft.  It was released initially on PC back in March but is now available on consoles.

Essentially this is a colouring book.  At the start of each level (if you want to call them that), you get a black outline picture of something such as a cake, a pizza, a teddy bear and so on.  Your job is to colour in all the spaces between the lines.  To do this you just select a colour, move your cursor to the bit you want to fill in and press the button and it is then filled.  It’s much like using the ‘fill’ tool in MS Paint or any photo/graphics editor. To move on to the next picture, all you need to do is fully colour the picture.  If you’re a dirty trophy slut then this can be as easy as picking one colour and ‘clicking’ on every space in the picture but, if you want your time with Alive Paint to be meaningful, you’ll do things properly and actually provide some artistry to the task.

The game gives you eleven base colours to use (mostly your primary and secondary colours) and then nine shades of each one.  So grey can go from white to black, red from light pink to a dark scarlet and so on.  You’ve seen colours before, you know how they work.  But beyond that there are no other tools to play with really.  This is a simple, relaxing piece of software but you’d think that other options wouldn’t be too hard to implement such as patterned fills or even the option to sub-divide colourable spaces with lines.  There’s not even a colour blind mode.

But what you do get is a very nice, relaxing bit of software with dozens of pictures to colourise at your leisure.  The actual mechanics of the game work well enough on console (although you get a sense that mouse and keyboard is probably the optimal way to play this game).  The initial cursor speed is far too frantic and we had to turn it down to three (out of twenty) in the sensitivity settings to make it playable and even then some of the smaller paint areas can be easy to miss but generally the controls are fine.

With its simple music and colourful visuals, the game is nice to spend time with.  You’ve not got a ton of artistic freedom but you’ve got just enough for it all to be reasonably satisfying and there’s a nice touch where finished pictures are then animated (hence the game’s title).  But ultimately this game isn’t going to provide much more than that and but it’ll work well for kids certainly but also adults looking for a chilled out time.