Paint gives you abilities in this curious IGF finalist game.
Finalists have been announced at the Independent Games Festival and there are some pretty fascinating creations lurking in there. One that stood out to me is a game called Tag: The Power of Paint.
Developed by students studying at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, Tag is a puzzle platformer seemingly inpired by Portal – even in its presentation of instructions for getting around certain obstacles. This is no Portal clone, but an actually innovative take on the new first-person shooter puzzle genre.
Tag puts you in a mostly grey world in which colour both effects and affects movement. You equip a gun that squirts paint in order to reach the goal – a giant glob of paint, natch. This gun gives you various abilities depending on the colour of paint you use – green makes you jump, blue sticks you to a surface so you can defy gravity, and passing over red acts as a speed boost. Mixing them together, they make for some intriguing challenges, although, in the game’s current form, the puzzles are fairly straight-forward.
Certainly not the prettiest and most polished of games, but it breathes fresh air into an already reinvented genre and that’s all that really matters. It’s fairly short, finishing in roughly 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing, but it demonstrates a lot of potential. Hopefully we see something larger come out of this.
You can download Tag from its website – otherwise, below is a clip of the game played in its entirety.
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