Artisan: Going Home Again Review – Living the Life of a Not-Quite Starving Artist

Unseen Kingdom released Artisan: Going Home Again last week for PC through Desura.

last week for PC through Desura. The game is a life-sim RPG focusing on a character named Ellie who’s trying to earn enough money to buy her childhood home back by using the one trade she’s a little good at, art.

The game is played mainly with a mouse, with a few keyboard shortcuts that don’t always work the way they should. Players will control Ellie as she tries to find freelance jobs, complete them within the deadline, and work on her own personal projects in order to reach her final goal. Players will need to balance the workload in order to make sure that Ellie doesn’t get too stressed, or lose inspiration while trying to complete a job.

Artisan splits each day within the game into three different parts: Morning, afternoon, and night. Each part of the day can be used to do any particular task, although it is better for Ellie to simply sleep through the night or suffer serious stress consequences. Players can use the morning and afternoons to search for new jobs, or simply go out and visit the Library, the Museum, or walk through the park. Ellie can also spend time and money to work on her personal projects, which range from simply writing random poetry for free inspiration and stress relief, to working on a comic book or an artistic masterpiece. Ellie can also create new clothing for her to wear, which provides different bonuses and passive abilities that allow her to fight off stress better and stay inspired.

Players can also have Ellie sketch or craft, which then leads to a mini-game that will determine just how well she does. Sketching will lead players to a memory-matching mini-game. There’s a time-limit to complete the entire level, which rewards Ellie with a finished C or B rank drawing and improves her technical ability by a small amount. Crafting is a mini-game that asks players to complete a picture by rotating and moving tiles on the screen. The end result is a number of cutely crafted items that Ellie can sell for a little money at the Museum gift shop, and a few other locations. There are also other skills that the player must keep an eye on and improve, or keep within a reasonable level, in order to continue the game.

Stress and Health aren’t skills that level up, but instead represent an important part of Ellie’s ability to keep working. Too much stress leads to lower health, and health that’s too low will leave Ellie weak and unable to work well for a while. Players will also need to keep Ellie’s inspiration high in order to keep her motivated with each task she gets her hands on. Finally, there are the three skills that level up with consistent use, up to a maximum of 10: Technical, Social, and Renown.

Technical represent Ellie’s ability to draw, paint, and otherwise create art for any given task. The better she is at it, the faster she can finish each job, even the more difficult ones. Social is fairly easy to understand, allowing Ellie to speak to people more as she tries to sell her items. Some characters will open up a bit more to Ellie when she’s more sociable as well. Finally, renown represents how well Ellie is known for her art. This improves with the completion of different jobs to start, but there are also options through completing personal projects.

The game’s graphics are adorable, using hand-drawn imagery to portray just about everything, including the characters, the menu, and the backgrounds. The game is colorful and the style is great, though it does feel like there’s less art than there should be. The matching mini-game for example provides a number of B or C rank drawings upon completion, which is simply represented by a sketched out piece of artist paper with a big letter on the front. I was hoping to see something more like concept art, or otherwise a more qualitative representation of the sketched out art instead of a rank and a number. This is an issue that affects all of the jobs and projects that Ellie works on, with the only reward being money instead of the final product itself. Or to put it another way, it feels like there’s a lot more quantity than there is quality.

The story follows Ellie as she works to buy her childhood home in order to make sure she can keep those memories along with something tangible, the house itself. It’s a bit selfish, but serves as a good starting point as Ellie meets different people and continues to work hard on her skills. Will she keep the house? Or will she find something better? There are several endings to explore, each based on different actions that Ellie takes to reach her goal. The story does fall flat a little bit when players realize that there is no time limit and thus no pressure of failure to worry about, or to drive players forward. What saves the story are the other characters, who are in many ways more interesting than Ellie herself. One character, for example, speaks on how he’s burdened with the knowledge that his birth is the reason his mother can’t stay in her career or follow her dream. It’s heavy stuff. Their stories are layered in different ways, with players learning more as Ellie continues to speak with them, get to know them, and show them some of her artwork for critiques or advice.

The game is somewhat long because of the amount of grinding necessary to improve certain skills, which is unfortunate because it tends to get a little repetitive. However, it helps that there are 15 different endings that players can discover, each dependent on what character Ellie befriended, and how she was able to reach her final goal of $50,000.

The game is fun with a very mild learning curve. The tutorial explains everything well enough, and it doesn’t take long for players to get in the groove of balancing between work, inspiration, and rest. However, there isn’t enough variety in the gameplay and the two mini-games to keep things interesting for long. As I said before, I found the side characters more interesting than Ellie, which leaves me in a neutral state when it comes to pushing her to succeed. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is a little repetitive, but keeps itself as background music and doesn’t really grate the nerves too much. The variety is interesting, with some songs having a blues feel to it, while others are simply contemplative. Each song uses only a few instruments to great effect.

I also cannot say that Artisan: Going Home Again is very innovative. While it is true that Artisan does something new by focusing on succeeding with a creative job, that particular element is still doable with a game like The Sims . Even the basis of the story is similar to another indie game called Recettear , in which the main character has to pay off her debt by learning to run a shop beneath her home. One of the major differences between the two games that Artisan could have considered was the implementation of a time limit.

In my personal opinion, Artisan: Going Home Again is a good game, but not a great one. Several things simply stood out as not artistic enough, which is ironic for a game that focuses on an artist and her lifestyle trying to make ends meet. It’s also a little unrealistic in the pressure-free environment that the game provides, not requiring Ellie to pay for her food, water, and electricity, or any other basic necessities except those that fund her project.<

Artisan: Going Home Again is available for PC on Desura, for $9.99. Based on the amount of gameplay involved in order to reach each of the 15 endings, this price is worth the purchase. However, if you don’t like repetitive, simple gameplay then this may not be for you.