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Concrete Genie Reviews
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Concrete Genie paints an impressive picture with delightful gameplay and heart warming characters. it's a great way to spend a few hours unleashing your creativity.
It’s hard to play Concrete Genie and not be charmed by it. You can just tell that a whole lot of love has been put into making it. It may not be complex in terms of gameplay, and many of its mechanics feel appropriated from other games, but it’s surprising and unique in numerous ways. As soon as you’ve created your first genie and witnessed it joyously spring to life, you’ll fall in love with it. After that, the time flies by like you’re having fun with a friend. Concrete Genie is all about bringing light into a world that has grown dark. I think we could all do with a bit of that, couldn’t we...
The name Concrete Genie does not do this game justice. What it invokes, a sprawling urban landscape of brutalist concrete towers looming above the horizon is not what you’ll see here. In fact, even in the sections that involve industrial factories and warehouses, the buildings are still more often than not adorned with red bricks, not grey slabs.
Imagine if your best friends lived on the pages of a sketchbook or the walls of an abandoned coastal town. Imagine drawing your brush across a surface, and not just bringing the image into existence, but actually bringing it to life. Imagine being able to quite literally push back darkness and negativity with light, positivity, and friendship. Concrete Genie is all of those things and more packed into a game that initially feels small, yet bursts at the seams with a mountain of heart and themes, both obvious and subtle.
Tech-wise there were a few frame drops, and I played on a PlayStation 4 Pro. These drops weren't enough to mess with the gameplay, but they were noticeable a couple of times. I didn't run into any crashes or bugs during my playthrough. There is a VR mode, which isn't the campaign mode. It is separate, but I don't have VR, so I can't speak to it.
Concrete Genie is held back slightly by its reluctance to trust us with more freedom of creation, and its third act combat feels somewhat out of place. Still, it still manages to do a wonderful job of giving players a reason to explore its eerie and beautiful town and interact with its colorful genies, and its narrative is successful in merging two very different tones to tell a tale that bounces admirably between somber and lighthearted.
Concrete Genie has a great score and impressive art direction which leave you absolutely jaw-dropped at times. It’s a short game though, and that feels even more so when the game goes away from its core strengths and barrels towards the finish line with lackluster combat sequences.
At times, Concrete Genie can be a little too pleasant, which makes the action-packed conclusion really jarring. Still, the contrast between Ash's fantasy and his reality is truly stunning.
Republished on Wednesday 27th January, 2021: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of February 2021's PS Plus lineup. The original text follows.
All the imperfections and sorrows of the world... They fill human hearts with Darkness and seem to become an integral part of our selves. If only we could take a magic brush and cleanse it once and for all, make the world around us a better place to live. Well, Concrete Genie allows you to do just that. The game takes you on an emotional journey across abondoned town of Denska and your goal is to paint it back to life.
Pixelopus’ sophomore effort makes me constantly yearn for the painting that could’ve been instead of the painting that is. Whereas wider anticipation was built up for the brain-splattering exercises in Days Gone or Hideo Kojima’s next weird [...]
Concrete Genie, the latest PS4 release from Sony studio Pixelopus, is a bright, heartwarming game about a young boy named Ash who brings a dreary town to life through magic and painting.