On a nondescript day in your atelier, you meet up with an old colleague. Arts a tough gig and you’re not exactly coming up with new pieces every day, so your friend pops in with a canvas he’d like you to check out. “Easy does it”, he says, you wouldn’t want to hurt the lady. No time to check your phone and don’t you even think about opening your curtains for some light. Developer SleepingMuseum and publisher KEMCO’s ‘Matsuro Palette’ wants your eyes to gaze upon the one and only unfinished painting. A painting of a lady, splotched in black, clearly unfinished.
But it doesn’t take long for you to find your colleague gone, leaving you with the unfinished canvas. And then you’re sent to an infinite void. Complete with floating doors, vines sprouting randomly, angels, the whole shebang.
Matsuro Palette is a narrative adventure point ‘n click title, ported to consoles for the first time. Here, players are placed face-to-face with “the lady adorned with the blue flower”. The last person that was handling her met with an unfortunate fate and you’ll soon find out why—she’s very picky and rarely does she give second chances. The basement of your atelier very quickly will become a corpse party of sorts as you die over and over again just to please this old bag in the making. See, she’s incomplete and she’s been looking for the right painter to finish the job. All though that’s likely very difficult to do when your painters are being skewered, frozen, or outright being turned inside out.
The basement has become a strange place. Doors are floating about, leading to the remnants of a kitchen, bedroom, and living room. All of them featuring floating chairs and beds and the like. The steps that lead outta this creepy workshop are a jumbled mess, so your only option is going to be finding the right inspiration in your surroundings to paint on the young lady’s canvas. Of the seven days the player lives with this painting, each day will have them collect ideas from their environment and place them right where she likes it lest you become floor decor. Matsuro Palette is a short adventure with some horror elements. Nothing scary, but definitely spooky thanks to excellent sound design and a select few tracks that do a good job of accompanying a scene’s setting. Sound effects sound like they come straight off PC-98 software as does the music.
Every day is a puzzle and, over the course of the game’s story you’ll begin to learn more about the young lady and her circumstances. You might feel bad for her, heck you might even want to continue painting her despite the fact that she has total power over you. I thought I did, thanks to Matsuro Palette’s lovely visual style and supporting player agency on certain choices they can make for the young lady. The game, despite being very limited in what choices you can make, does a great job of mixing up its puzzles—and will happily nudge you in the right direction if you end up a bit stumped. Though ultimately the gameplay loop is rather simple and, even Matsuro Palette’s short runtime, does run its course towards the end of the game. But ultimately, despite the sad veil underneath, there’s only so much I can of someone who is more than happy to smash my head into a brick wall.
There’s a lot of ways to die and only one way to progress the story, with each death being recorded into the game’s gallery. Most of your deaths will be honest mistakes… But some of them can have you subject the blue flower-equipped lady to a bit of pain, emotionally and physically.
Matsuro Palette offers a unique concept to the point ‘n click narrative adventure genre. A solid visual style and accompanying sound design gives this game an allure that kept me going, in search of the mystery behind this young lady in the painting. If you’d like a short, bittersweet tale that involves you dying in many ways, look no further than here—a unfinished canvas that desperately needs your help. ∎
Matsuro Palette
Played on
Windows 11 PC
PROS
- Solid visual style and sound design.
- Novel gameplay concept.
CONS
- Gameplay loop does run its course sooner than I'd like.
- I can't quite say I liked our captor, even in the end.
