Spray Paint Simulator Review – A Therapeutic Stroke of Color

Spray Paint Simulator Review

Simulator games are excellent at scratching a very specific itch. For example, if you love power washing and want to expand on that particular paradigm, then Spray Paint Simulator is here for you. Somehow, spraying everything you see with a variety of intense colors is both frustrating and deeply satisfying. It’s slow, grinding work, but there’s no denying that the finished product is lovely to behold. I don’t know how much fun I had, but this game is pretty hard to put down.

The complete premise is baked right into the title. You’re painting a host of different places and things, turning drab environments into vibrant ones. You’ve got to tape and mask off different sections to ensure your work is clean, and you need money to keep up your paint supplies. Sometimes a given surface is very high up, which requires a ladder, scaffold, or cherry picker to reach. That’s it!

Your controls are simple and intuitive. The visuals are clean and bright. Every environment is weirdly sterile, and you never interact directly with any other people. All communication is done through text or email. The colors you paint in are bold, powerful, and pure. The only real hitches in the experience are the jobs themselves. Make no mistake, this is work you’re doing. Satisfying work, to be sure, but work nonetheless.

Colors That Really Pop

Just covering something in Marshmallow Mint paint is some real zen garden stuff. Seeing that percentage tick up to 100 is awesome, every single time. But trying to reach certain spots is a righteous pain, full stop. It’s during those times that Spray Paint Simulator feels a lot more like a job than I’m comfortable with. Perhaps the struggle only makes the eventual satisfaction more sweet, but I don’t feel this in the moment. Instead, I’m burdened with a toil I volunteered for, a boulder I sought out and signed up for.

Speaking of hard-to-reach spots, using the cherry picker is a certified nightmare. It’s the one greasy shadow on an otherwise sunny experience, controls-wise. If you’re not oriented perfectly, the controls are reversed and/or flipped about. You can quite easily get the whole thing stuck under a bridge or bit of scaffolding, and it never gets close enough to the spot in question. I hated every second of it. Everything else works just fine, but that cherry picker is straight-up garbage.

Get Weird With It

If you’ve grown tired of the hard lines and rigid boundaries of the career mode, you can do a little free painting instead. It’s a chance to flex your creative muscles, though you’re doing so in a sort of vacuum. At least with career mode, there’s a sense of accomplishment. Once you’ve painted an entire bridge in a single shade, however, a little freedom starts to look incredibly attractive by comparison.

There’s something very soothing about finishing jobs in Spray Paint Simulator. Though you might struggle to do so, getting everything perfectly painted is terribly compelling. You rip off the masking, re-attach the missing pieces, and bask in the wonder of a fresh paint job. I wouldn’t call this game fun, exactly, but there’s no denying the appeal. Perhaps there’s a visceral satisfaction in finishing these jobs that players can’t find in their own work. Or maybe there’s a structured simplicity to these tasks in particular that rises above the labor of the real world.

Like any good simulator game, you know exactly what you’re getting into here. You’ve got a lot of work ahead, and though you might not enjoy it, you won’t be able to easily put it down. Spray Paint Simulator is a simple yet compelling zen garden, a Sunday morning job perfectly captured in game form. I don’t recommend it, but I don’t really have to. If this calls to you, I’m certain that you’ll answer.

***A Steam key was provided by the publisher***