ART IS RIFLE Reviews

The game is a wild, colorful trip that turns puzzles into a psychedelic dance. Shooting paint to solve challenges feels weirdly satisfying, like solving a riddle with a paintball gun. It never explains much, but that’s part of the fun—you learn by messing around. It’s quirky, bold, and totally unlike anything I’ve played before.

This was kind of an impulse buy because it looked neat and trippy but the actual act of playing it is... fairly straightforward, and often unpleasant. Ostensibly a rule-learning game but there are only a few rules and you learn them at the start, each sector has a "gimmick" but it's fairly obvious what it is in each case. The problem is that it's mostly a game about lining up ricochets... which isn't all that fun to begin with, but then the game loves being extra annoying about it. Lots of instances where success doesn't come down to either clever puzzle solving or reflex-based gameplay but just. Pure luck. No skill. I won because I got lucky, that's how a lot of this game feels. Like, it's not devoid of cute puzzles or interesting action/platforming setpieces, it's fun sometimes, but more often it's just tedious and unpleasant. From the trailer I expected a bit more emphasis on the audio design of the game but really the different drum hits are just, different ricochets and the actual music in-game is fairly minimal whenever it does exist. And some of the flashing effects really did not need to be there, like, yes you can disable them but. You could also just not include them :s Fairly short for the price point, too. I got it on sale so w/e but I can't see this running anyone much more than 5-6 hours, even with whatever secret hunting there is (that I seem to have missed out on entirely but whatever?)

Solid puzzle game, has some pretty unique and creative mechanics but never gets too convoluted: the lack of reviews is probably due to the high price, outside of sales it's $20 for 5-7 hours.