Tag: The Power of Paint is a free to play adventure that embraces the power of colour and combines it with a first person perspective and shooter based elements. Originally designed as a school project in a similar manner to Narbacular Drop the students behind the game contributed some of their puzzle concepts into the popular puzzle adventure, Portal 2 where they were transformed into the Gel mechanic of Portal 2. Made with a team of 7 students in the game was originally created over a decade ago in 2008 and remains accessible through the DigiPen College website to this day.
Set in a mostly colourless game world Tag: The Power of Paint lets this be the players playground for creativity and puzzle solving across a number of game levels. Opting for typical puzzle designed levels Tag: The Power of Paint requires player to overcome map obstacles to reach the level ending checkpoint before advancing to the next colourless level. Reaching said end points will require players to use the games colour mechanics, allowing them to reach areas and heights not possible otherwise.
While the majority of levels will send the player to the start of the level upon death (e.g. from falling out of bounds of the game area) the later longer designed levels do contain some checkpoint mechanics which can help prevent frustration from careless mistakes.
The colour mechanics adopted by Tag: The Power of Paint are available through the paint gun provided on the second level of the game and serves as the primary game mechanic throughout. Offering two modes the paint gun allows players to remove any paint on the level (whether placed by the player or not) but more importantly paint the game world in one of three colours provided that colour is available as an item pickup for that level and has been collected.
In traditional puzzle fashion Tag: The Power of Paint requires players to leverage the basics of the three colour system through single colour usage before combining multiple colours in a single sequence during the later level designs. The first such colour that players are introduced to is green which acts to make all surfaces bouncy and thus allows the player to traverse heights and distances with ease compared to their normal jump.
The second colour that players will encounter in Tag: The Power of Paint is red which increases the players speed when walking on top of a red surface (after all red does make things go faster). Finally blue rounds out the three colour experience of Tag: The Power of Paint which provides a sticky mechanic to the game where players can stick to walls and even ceilings to overcome sections that would be otherwise impassable.
Summary:
- A first person puzzle game that leverages a unique colour mechanic for gameplay.
- Use three different colours (red, green and blue) to defeat each level through big jumps, speed and wall walking.
- Dozens of levels that slowly build and develop the paint mechanics.
- Free to play game created by DigiPen College students.
- Features puzzle mechanics that were later adopted into Portal 2 (gel system).
Links:
Videos:
Review Platform: PC
