Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie is an action-adventure video game developed by Pixelopus and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4.

[6] In addition to free-style drawing, there is a set of core puzzles in the game that the player has to solve through their artwork.

Once thriving, it has been abandoned after an oil spill caused by a tanker, along with it being slowly taken over by a force simply called Darkness, which stems from negative emotions.

The brush also allows Ash to create Genies: friendly creatures based on chalk drawings that he made as a child.

Ash returns to Denska and starts bringing life back to the town and eliminating the Darkness, finding more pages and creating more Genies on the way.

He sometimes crosses paths with the bullies, but when they try to take the brush, Ash experiences a vision of their past, revealing that they all had troubled childhoods: Zack ran away from home to escape his arguing and dysfunctional parents, Chuck and Janie's parents became separated, Beatrice's father was incarcerated, and Froggie is implied to hang out with them only to avoid being bullied himself.

During the credits, Ash is shown to have become friends with the others, who each receive their own magic brush from Luna, and people begin returning to Denska.

Creative director Dominic Robillard says the game is heavily inspired by Sega's Jet Set Radio, while the concept of painting street arts came from one of the team members, Ashwin Kumar, who grew up in India.

[21] Praise was directed towards its visual style, atmosphere, thematic elements and art-based gameplay, while criticism was pointed at the game's easy difficulty level and combat.