Painter’s Guild was recently added on Steam and bills itself as a management sim style game with the twist of running an art academy during the Italian Renaissance. Unfortunately, despite taking place during the height of creativity, the game goes for a slow burn instead of interesting choices.
Artistic Medium:
The game opens up with you creating an artist from available preset features and a city to start in. From there, you’ll be taken to the countryside and your one room academy with the task to earn enough money to keep expanding the guild with more artists and rooms. Each artist comes with a style that they will paint in along with two personality quirks that affect their work and random events.
Every few seconds you’ll receive a customer who wants a painting done; with varying degrees of difficulty and a style request. To do a project, simply drag the easel into your guild and put a painter to work on it. Completing tasks will earn you prestige which will increase the difficulty and possible rewards over time.
Sometimes a great project will be available and you can send multiple artists for hopefully a bigger payday. Artists can be upgraded either through completing projects or training which will increase their ability to product works quicker. In order to fully upgrade an artist, you will need to send them out to learn abroad and finally paint a masterpiece at specific points in their development.
Great projects pop up to give you something else to do, but your actual control over the project is limited at best
Your guild is fully customizable; with decorations, tools and ways to recover your artists and help them improve faster. As time goes on, your painters will age and eventually die, forcing you to recruit new ones and train them up as well.
For a basic concept Painter’s Guild isn’t bad, but its ties to the management sim genre are spotty at best.
Creative Block:
The problem with Painter’s Guild from a management sim standpoint is that the game just doesn’t really offer the player any detail of choices. Items are set up strictly as forms of upgrades and if there was any major difference between an expensive bed or a sofa that has the same stats, the game doesn’t mention it. There are no decisions to make when it comes to creating art other than what member of your guild to use and by extension the style; this is a huge step down from the amazing Big Pharma that lets you get into the fine details of your production.
What really hurts the game is that the game is set up as a really slow burn in terms of progression. Expect to spend a lot of time slowly building up your guild and members before you can afford anything. What’s worse is that your progression with your members is finite; members will eventually grow old and die, leaving you with a slot to fill in your guild.
The game starts off well, but there is simply too little growth to sustain it past an hour or so of play, compared to other examples of the management sim genre
You can spend more money to start with higher base skill artists, but it doesn’t change the fact that the game lacks a true difference between the beginning, middle and end game.
Also, there is no sense of persistence with your members or their contributions; each master level artist can create a masterpiece, but it has a very limited use.
Mixing Paint:
The developer may add more content down the line, but Painter’s Guild at the moment is just too bare bones to be a part of the management sim genre. While it is easy to get into, there just isn’t enough content here for people to flex their creative or management muscle.
