The Artist

From my perspective, this is a game that clearly wants to be a Myst clone but doesn't replicate what I enjoy about Myst. Its superficially similar in that you're stranded on an island solving puzzles, and you travel to other worlds. But the puzzles, while challenging and logical to a degree, are a different breed when compared to how the puzzles flow in the Myst games.

This game is probably great for fans of The Witness, The Room, Rhem, or for die-hard puzzle solvers. For a casual Myst fan, I'd recommend games like Haven Moon or Elansar instead.

EDIT:
(2 years, 10 months later)
Changing the review to recommended, because I still remember trying to play this. If a game left a lingering impression on me, I think that's enough for a thumbs up. And I have played many worse games in this genre since I first wrote this review...like "Zof".

The Artist is a minimalistic first-person puzzle adventure game that doesn't really evoke any positive emotions except maybe a smidge of nostalgia for puzzle adventure games from 25 years ago. But even if you do yearn for more of those games, it's doubtful whether 'a smidge of…' will justify opening your Steam wallet for this extremely basic attempt at imitating an experience from bygone days.

In the Steam Store page's description, the developer compares The Artist to Myst among other adventure games. Indeed, when playing The Artist, you immediately see where that comparison comes from but you also can't help but feel it's just a very shallow attempt at generally recreating a certain gaming experience from 25 years ago, adding nothing and taking away everything except for the very bare basics.

First of all, I think it's fair to pose the question whether people are generally waiting for more games like Myst, Riven and the likes. We're talking about adventure games that were so difficult that 98% of the players could only finish them by repeatedly consulting a walkthrough or by writing down dozens of pages of possible clues they encountered and spending many hours on one puzzle, often eventually solving it by mere trial and error.

Then, for people who are indeed looking for that and for people who didn't live through that era and aren't really sure, we need to pose the question whether The Artist scratches the itch, as it were.

Those old-school, near-impossible puzzle adventure games of the 1990s looked gorgeous back then, and they oozed atmosphere and mystery in the form of puzzles that you felt compelled to solve.

The Artist looks minimalistic at best and just awful when describing it more frankly. There's nothing to see here that's even remotely eye pleasing.

The puzzles, while being the core of a puzzle adventure game like this, seem to be thrown in for good measure somehow. All of the puzzles revolve around the principle of looking for objects that have part of a combination written in or on them, and eventually matching some of those symbols or glyphs to the correct puzzle. For example, you see a couple of doors that are protected by a combination lock, so you need to look around the whole game world for objects that have part of the combination written on them. And every puzzle is a variation on that principle, so you'll find a lot of objects that have glyphs or other symbols written on them and you'll see puzzles that require some of those symbols to solve, so the matchmaking can begin.

Yes, that is reminiscent of Myst, Riven and similar puzzle adventure games, but those games managed to motivate the player to solve the puzzles by adding a compelling narrative or a mysterious setting, they managed to insert variety in their puzzles (or at least create the illusion of variety very well) and they managed to present their game in a form that was easy on the eye.

Also, The Artist's game world is tiny. You can walk around the whole island in less than one minute and that's only because there's no option to sprint.

The most annoying thing about The Artist has to be its mouse pointer. It's a small black circle, so when trying to investigate a dark surface for spots to interact with, you don't see the mouse pointer. But worse than that, the mouse pointer only appears when it's right on top of an interactable part of an object. Even when you know there to be an interactable spot, it can take a while to focus the invisible mouse pointer (i.e. the exact middle of your screen) on the 'sweet spot' to make the mouse pointer appear and finally be able to click to interact. And if you don't know there to be an interactable area on an object and you just want to investigate the object, you'll have a very hard time finding any interactable areas if there are any.

At one point, the mouse pointer even bugged out on me by disappearing for good, not even showing up in the game's menu anymore. So I had to Alt + F4 to quit the game and restart it to solve the problem.

Playing The Artist feels like going from Lego to Duplo, like going from Windows 98 to Windows 3.1 or like going from cell phone to rotary dial telephone. It should therefore only be considered by people who sometimes miss the frustration of the difficult puzzle adventure games of 25 years ago and would settle for experiencing only that, and none of the things that those games did right so as to 'justify' frustrating the player.

I would like to mention that I have been in contact with the developer (we talked after I had initially purchased and started to play the game). Please enjoy my thoughts on the game!

The Artist follows the story of someone (you, the player) who is transported into a painting and must figure out the events leading to the existence of such a world. The narrative progresses through puzzle solving and exploration of the island, much like the Myst series.

You mainly interact with the world by clicking on various buttons, switches, books and locks which remain consistent throughout the world and are done so intentionally. I found puzzles involving these to not be frustrating and that entering the solution to them, once figured out, felt right. There were solutions to some puzzles that I found annoying to enter in which lead me no choice but to get help, however, these were scarce.

The puzzles themselves were all well thought out and nicely intertwined with one another. For the most part, the puzzles had an order in which they had to be solved. This means that if you are stuck, you have no choice but to continue to work on the current puzzle. Overall, I found all the puzzles to be fair (unfair puzzles are a common problem I find in these types of games), however, there was one puzzle that I felt was a bit arbitrary where the hints and clues left around did not connect in my eyes.

After the game released, I was able to contact the designer and developer of the game (it is just one person!) and streamed myself completing the game while giving my thought process. The designer seemed really open to some of my concerns and has an interest in fixing some of the issues that came up. One such issue was that I found it to be difficult to know what you are looking at as the 'crosshair' only appears when looking at an interactive object.

Story in this game is mostly served through reading books left around the world that contain information that helps drive the narrative as well as give clues about solutions to the puzzles. There was something intriguing about the world that the designer built that left me asking for more, despite finding the length of the game to be just right.

If you have some loose change and enjoy puzzly explory games with an interesting story, pick this up!

This game was fun.

Has fun elements from other puzzle-adventure games!

RECOMMEND!