How do you make painting fun for those without an artistic bone in their body? Game developers have come up with a few answers – or at least, they’ve tried. There’s the straightforward approach of something like Mario Paint, where players are handed a mouse accessory and creation tools similar to Microsoft Paint. In Ōkami, a painter’s brush is used as a weapon and a magic wand in a Zelda-like world. In The Unfinished Swan, the world (and the story) are gradually revealed by the player’s spattered ink.
Forthcoming painting game Été is less about the process of making art on a canvas, and more about making players feel as if they are making the world more beautiful. It lets you make art without any of the friction. “Like lots of games, Été fulfils a fantasy through role playing, the fantasy of being a painter – and to do so, we assume your avatar is already a talented painter,” says creative director Lazlo Bonin. “Painting in Été is not about skill, it’s about creativity and enjoyment.”
Bonin was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where the game is set. He loved its beautiful summers. “With many months of harsh winter in between each of them, it seems like the city suddenly comes alive during the season, everyone scrambling to seize as much of the moment as they can,” he says. Été translates both to “summer” and to “what has been” in French, describing his nostalgic rose-tinted memories of childhood summertime.
The game didn’t start as a painting game: it became one, because it seemed the most natural way to tell a story about being surrounded by nostalgic beauty. A grab bag of aesthetic influences includes 1998 French children’s game L’Album Secret de l’Oncle Ernest, which inspired Été’s canvas design, and the movie Amélie, which informs game’s tone. Bonin calls it a “celebration of everyday bliss” in an “idealised city.”
In Été, painting is fun because it’s a vehicle for exploring and understanding your surroundings. Walking around the city, the player beautifies and adds colour to their surroundings – think Super Mario Sunshine, with its gunk-banishing water gun, but in reverse. “We used painting to make walking and exploring active instead of passive,” says Bonin. “You need to paint to reveal the shapes and colours of the world around you, which makes you pay attention to your surroundings a lot more than if the world were already revealed, pre-coloured.”
There’s also more open-ended creativity in Été’s canvases, which work more like a straightforward art tool: you can draw what you want. Bonin says that the game’s 2D creation tools, featured in its pre-release demos, have already inspired obsessively detailed works of art.
Bonin hopes that his game about finding beauty in everyday places can ignite the same impulse out in the real world. “A good friend once told me that Été is a game that gets you ‘looking instead of seeing, listening instead of hearing,’” he says. What better time to release it than the middle of the Montreal summer?
Été is out on PC on 23 July.
