Quick Review: Coloring Game

It’s not a new fad anymore, but I have seen the rise of coloring books, which claim to have a relaxing effect. Not sure how well it works in practice, but it’s still popular enough that I see coloring books for adults everywhere. Mandalas, scenes of wilderness, animals, ones for all kinds of fandoms… Surely there’s a way to transpose this to a video game?

Oh, that's a lot of squares to paint.

Developed and published by L. Stotch, and released on April 12th, 2019, Coloring Game takes this idea and rolls with it, featuring many beautiful pixel art images that you color by yourself. Pick a picture, then pick one of the colors, and paint to your heart’s content! This feels closer to a paint-by-numbers book, really, as each color has its number and all squares for a color are highlighted when you select that color – it’s not a difficult game, it’s meant to be relaxing after all.

Seeing the pic get made over time, it is quite nice.

The base game contains 15 pictures, some of which are already fairly large (the smallest contains only 1920 squares, while the largest one has dimensions of 210X250 pixels, for a total of 52,500 squares). At the time of writing, there are four DLC packs available, most of which contain 30 additional pictures (one only has 20), with sizes going all the way up to 500X500, a total of 250,000 pixels. But if you want them, you have to pay. The base 15 images is where the free part of this game ends.

The options aren't described, so here goes:
-Current color's squares highlighted, not highlighted,
highlighted without numbers; number font size;
whether you want colors other than the one you're doing at
that moment to become Xs, to be erased, or to be locked in place.

Painting by numbers is fun, I'll grant the game that. In the options, you can choose to lock into a square the color that's been given to it - so you won't erase it if you click over it with the mouse while doing a different color. Unfortunately, that's not the starting option; when you start, you will be erasing other colors as you try to paint over all the squares of the current color. I wasn't aware of this, because the options menu doesn't have any text whatsoever and thus I didn't know what each option stood for. Why would anyone play this game with the possibility of erasing the color off painted squares?

A later update to the game added an auto-fill feature, and I'll admit they had a fun idea for it. Meet Joe. He’s the laziest lazybutt to have ever lazybutted into this picture-coloring company. He’s a literal sloth.

"Here's          how          long          I'll          take          to
finish          the          current          color.          Have          you
ever          heard          the          joke          about          the
three-          humped          camel?"

At least get yourself a chair, lazybutt!

"Nah,          floor's          good          for          me."

That said, he may be personified by a sloth, he still works faster than any human would. He won’t paint over finished squares by accident, and he doesn’t have that pesky human flaw of having to search for the squares that haven’t been painted yet. It’s pretty good when you’ve done quite a bit on a picture and don’t feel like finishing it yourself. It's also very useful if you've got only two or three squares left for one particular color, and can't find them in the goddarned huge pictures. You can have Joe paint a single color or all colors at once, and either on an area of the picture or on the entire image.

Also, Joe works the colors in order, left to right,
top to bottom. Totally not like a robot.

There are two flaws with this feature, however: The first one is that while Joe is “working”, you cannot do anything with the game – such as work on a different picture, as an example. You have to wait for the timer to finish. Making it possible to work on other images would have been nice. In fact, working on the image along with Joe would have been great! It allows the player to be active instead of passive. The second flaw is tied directly to this: An auto-fill function is nice, yes, but it means that if you so desire, this game becomes a literal wait-to-win game. You could choose not to color in a single square in the entire game and have Joe finish everything.

I mean, I can’t be mad at Joe, he’s my Employee of the Month. Now if only he wrote these reviews in my place.

That's a lot of DLCs.

Alright, final words, this is fun if you feel like playing a relaxing game without stakes. There’s still a few points of criticism:

-While I understand the need for DLCs since the base game is free, said base game is still fairly short with only 15 images;

-There aren’t any explanations regarding the options, so I couldn’t figure out what some of these options were for. Had I known, I wouldn’t have struggled so much with the color squares getting erased;

-As I said earlier, the auto-fill is a good idea, but a few improvements could still be made to it.
-Every single image is tied to an acievement for completion, so if you're an achievement hunter like me, you'd have to buy every DLC pack.

-The game does come with a few tracks of music, which it’ll start playing instantly unless you disable that option. I personally prefer to have my own music while coloring.

But overall, I enjoy this one just fine. The pieces of pixel art are detailed and impressive, and they’re great to look at when completed. You don’t feel like paying? You have 15 pictures, a great way to try out the game and see if you like it. And if you do like it, the DLCs are there for you.