Introduction

"El Arte" is an artistic game developed by Mirak, Superstroke, and zDS for the Tim Tam Slam Jam. A game jam event that ran from February 22nd, 2019, to March 31st, 2019, and required people to create teams of three in order to participate. These teams also had to design their games around art and "El Arte" does this by asking what art even is. A question that has so many answers we could be here all day trying to address it.

Story

On the story side of things you play as a massive penis on a quest to understand the very concept of art. A task so monumental that it will require you to dive into the deep holes, participate in guitar duels, and slay the legendary Jabberwock. As you can imagine this means the game has a lot of unique endings that range from being philosophically deep to simply telling the player they suck.



On the other hand, I really don't believe the developers when they claim this game has at least 44 unique endings. After all, I imagine even the greatest of minds would be hard pressed to come up with 44 unique endings to a game even with a little over a month to work on this project.

Gameplay

On the gameplay side of things you simply spend your time interacting with various other characters and objects. So much so, that I'm not even sure if "El Arte" should qualify as a video game. After all, it tends to feel more like a choose your own adventure book in my opinion.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things the game features a blend of original assets as well as stock images. As a result, the game really doesn't have a clear look going for it. On the other hand, this chaotic approach tends to work in the game's favor in my opinion. After all, your on a quest to understand what art is in this game. And what the means will vary from person to person. So it's only fitting that the various areas of this game show off a weird melding of various styles and looks in that regard.

Conclusion

"El Arte" is so different from anything else I've judged on this site that I don't feel comfortable trying to place a numerical score on the quality of the game. As for whether you should play this game or not. I'm really not sure if I want to recommend for or against this title. After all, I really don't have anything else to compare it to. So, I don't know if this game should be considered a weird experiment for only the most die hard fans of RPG Maker projects or if this game should be played by everyone in order to get a brief glimpse into how difficult it is to define the very concept of what is and isn't art.