Artist Life Simulator

Let’s be honest - I clicked on Artist Life Simulator because of Van Gogh. Turns out, it’s an amazingly creative card-based simulator all about how you’re an artist moving to the big city to make it as a painter and get rich, change the world - realistic as it is, though, it took me less than an hour to die as a result of crippling poverty and severe alcohol addiction. In my second game, I was doing a lot better. I stayed away from alcohol, had two friends (unrealistic, ugh), enough money to live lavishly, but then the year 1920 hit and the demo ended. But there are a few quality of life issues like cards not returning to their place, tooltips taking up a lot of space as well as some bugs like duplicate buttons, that made this an increasingly frustrating experience. I thought I could get used to it or that the buttons jumping around every time they were pressed would settle down after a while, but it only got worse. Very sad about this, because this could be a great game, it’s just unpolished and unsupported, with a few super annoying bugs that make it frustrating and thus unplayable (for me). This is, in my opinion, too buggy for a full release. I requested a refund for this reason. Great premise and lots of fun content-wise, BUT frustrating, annoying bugs make it unplayable.

I don't like the fact that it uses AI to create paintings, but gameplay-wise it is a very enjoyable game. I am either a broke artist, a sick artist, a crazy artist, or all of the above. The stats are highly random and you might get frustrated at some point where you put in 1-16 worth of inspiration and get 1 worth in return. Very true to the irl artists, and the ending feels rather sarcastic too. 9/10 with one off for AI usage.

While interesting at times, the way Artist Life Simulator handles its endings prevents the player from actually feeling like an accomplished artist. Even though the game does not occur in an elevated reality, it expects the player to believe that a single painting fundamentally affected and even altered the human condition. Admittedly, the "art as a product" view that the game conforms to does work within the confines of the game, considering that we're playing as a starving artist, but tying the greatness of an artist to a single creation of theirs ultimately trivializes the process of artistic creativity, which rather feels self-defeating. I can excuse some of the Eurocentrism and Orientalism, but, even as a non-religious person, the fact that the game didn't even attempt to portray the complicated interplay between religion and art in favor of bashing its Christianity expy was really infuriating.

The starving artist struggle is real, good challenge, lots of cool art! It can be frustrating that the hover text does not match the actual interaction text and items required for many interactions.