Artis Impact

About halfway into Artis Impact, the debut game from solo developer Mas, the ever-endearing protagonist Akane turns to her AI companion, Bot, to confide a secret: “I have two personalities. The good one and the other one.” 

It’s a brief, fleeting bit and a character detail that has no precedent and will receive no follow-up. It begins to touch on something new, maybe even profound. I have no idea if Akane was being dry or if the reveal about herself is a shot at humour, a translation error, or a plot event to build the relationship between the protagonist and her companion. In the end, it doesn’t even matter.

There’s no better way to describe the game itself. The game ping-pongs between absolute brilliance, obtuse and unexplained systems, the best boss set pieces pixels have given shape to, absurdist humour, serious temple-rubbing on the role of AI, and characters whose one dimension is pure misogyny. I ended my 10 or so hour run of the game won over, but like with many hard-fought relationships, not without some confusion and loving sacrifice of my own expectations in order to understand the game better. 

Looking at Artis Impact is undeniably captivating. There’s uniformity to the art direction, which is all the more impressive because it pulls from mixed media and different pixel sizes. Typically, messing with multiple resolutions or PPI scaling (pixels per inch) of a frame can create distortions or inconsistencies across images that are placed together, which results in a jarring viewing experience. Artis Impact’s character portraits, overworld sprites, and sprites when used in certain interior locations, such as cities or dungeons, all use different pixel sizes. 

For example, when presenting comic- or manga-like storyboards, the smaller pixel sizes recall pencil drawings, with much finer line work and shading, in freeform tile sizes. The overworld sprites utilise pixel borders and fit within 32×32 (I’m guessing) tiles that suggest a chibi-like top-down overview of a minimalist, watercolour world. And then there’s a chunky, borderless pixel silhouette of characters when in the interiors that suggests a closeness and standoffishness simultaneously. In short, each art direction evokes a specific relationship to and between characters, and the consistency in each space is what unites all the art directions together. 

The technicality on display here is astounding. Artis Impact is a mosaic of different art directions, which find coherency primarily in the same colour palette shared across the board as well as using the different resolutions in specific contexts. I wouldn’t say I have the most trained eye for this kind of thing, but maybe that’s why I am so taken aback. It’s rare to see games attempt not only mixed pixel resolutions but also mixed media. Most battle scenes are backdropped by an appropriately pixelated photograph that seamlessly blends into the aesthetic of the game. 

Add in smooth and highly detailed animations, and there’s reason to gasp in awe every minute or so while working your way through the game. There’s no question of Mas’ talent here, with bespoke and wholly original movement in every pixel that gorgeously expresses mood and character.

While Artis Impact was visually breathtaking at every turn, beauty can only carry a game so far. Navigating the game, both within menus and to follow the plot events, was nothing short of a mess. 

Entering any menu broke the trance of the art style. Every time. Menus were bare and appeared unrefined, a sharp contrast with the art direction. With little explanation, I relied too much on previous game knowledge to figure out what was going on, and even then, I completed the game without fully understanding some of the numerous and often superfluous systems. Several times a new mechanic would get introduced, iterated upon for twenty minutes, and then exit the game forever. 

In combat, you have an MP and a TP meter, neither of which are tutorialised. You can spend a coin to purchase abilities that utilise either MP or TP, but each was described with a synonym for the word “perfect”, which, while cool, did not help me determine which ability I should get. 

Choosing any ability comes down to guessing what it does. But even then, when you read the description after it becomes available, nearly all of them say something like “Hits Two Random Enemies” or “Hits All Enemies”, which made me wonder why there were a dozen or so to choose from. Additionally, I had to guess if they required MP or TP to use, or even how they used those meters. For example, Peerless, far and away the most broken, overpowered attack, will hit two random enemies. But what if there’s only one enemy? Well, all attacks will hit that single enemy. It takes one half of your current MP bar to use, something I picked up on after noticing a pattern existed. However, it will scale the damage according to how much MP you use. So, if you have a full MP bar and then use Peerless on a single enemy, then you can finish a battle in seconds. If it’s a boss, then you can clear, at minimum, half an HP bar without issue. 

MP can be regenerated based on various equipment items. TP, however, can only be accumulated by guarding rather than attacking. Experimentation with the battle mechanics taught me this, and I sorely would have appreciated the game just telling me what everything means. TP seems like a much rarer resource, yet nearly every single TP attack was supremely underwhelming compared to MP attacks, which used a much more common resource. 

And this is just the battle system. As you journey throughout the world, you’ll amass an enormous collection of trinkets to equip, which thankfully are colour-coded and will show you a green plus symbol or a red negative symbol for the corresponding stats of your build, half of which I didn’t understand nor were they explained. In some story events, you’ll gain passive Mastery abilities as well as “Honor+” or “Reputation+” bonuses. Mastery abilities seem minimal at best and wholly superfluous at worst. I got a Mastery that gave me a whopping +10 HP when a single ring could net me +200 HP early on. The “Honor+” and “Reputation+” bonuses aren’t tracked anywhere. I never found out what they did for gameplay, nor could I tell at any moment, in battles or non-combat scenarios, if they did or meant anything.

You can upgrade your sword and Bot’s abilities in some of the more straightforward systems in the game. In a special room back at your organisation’s HQ, you go to specific stations to slot cores from bosses you’ve defeated or insert weapons into Bot. This is where your builds break wide open any shot at difficulty. It’s possible to stack wild amounts of bonus damage or have Bot heal you every turn. Adding counterattack percentages to your build will annihilate most mob enemies and trivialise bosses. Most basic battle encounters in the second half of the game would end within 10 seconds, should an enemy attack me first and then drop dead from counterattack and status damage build-up. I don’t think I spent longer than 90 seconds on any boss fight. 

I think I lucked out by picking the ability Peerless first. It was my easy button. It took considerable restraint to not click my way through every battle with it. Oddly, though, I didn’t mind Artis Impact being a breeze. There’s plenty here otherwise to charm, and I think that a sluggish or tediously drawn-out battle system would have ruined the pacing. Sure, it having some innovative, unique, or otherwise solid battle system would be welcome. But I’ll take what we got over something punishing.  

The principal reason to stick around is Akane. She’s modelled after the goth queen, 2B, from NieR: Automata, but with a much warmer and maybe naïve personality. Akane is a worthy princess in this lineage. In the first act, I struggled with her tsundere character, the back-and-forth dramatic shifts in any given social scenario. In one moment she’s planting the sloppiest kiss on Bot, and in the next she’s insightfully piecing together humanity’s purpose in the face of AI-led oppression. But by the end, I was rooting for her success.

Akane is a newly hired member of the special ops group, Lith-A. She lives in a rundown house in SunnySide and reports to HQ in nearby Mayval Woods. At the game’s start, her commander issues some small missions to track down threatening AI and remove their osmium cores. Her coworkers, Raven and Leni, are two kind but dismissive characters, but all three unite against Billy, sexism incarnate. When Billy first speaks, there’s an aside that explains that Billy is not a good person. And this is absolutely the case. Belligerently misogynistic, Billy has all the makings for a villain, but, as many people and plotlines do in Artis Impact, he’ll get left behind soon enough.

This narrative structure, in conjunction with the dungeons you navigate, seems like it’ll be the core design loop of Artis Impact. That’s only true for the first act, which ends well enough (it decides Billy’s fate), but from there, the game goes entirely off the rails. We’re talking fisticuffs with bears, tavern-wide chants of “GOTHIC GIRL”, a lemonade stand hustle, a dwarven-made prom dress and lingerie gift. Actually, it was surprising just how many run-ins with predators there are, both animals and human men. 

The writing makes this all immensely enjoyable. World-building be damned, the moment-to-moment conversations and the one-two strike with the absurdist jokes’ set-up and punchlines are rock solid. It took me several hours to settle in too, but once I tuned in to the game’s frequency, I found myself happily anticipating the unpredictable nature of Artis Impact. 

Akane weathers some wild scenarios, as alluded to before, with constant optimism but without self-sacrificing or giving her whole self into manipulation, despite her naivety. Although not exactly inquisitive, she does ponder her situation and what her “orga”, with Lith-A represents, and how her own personal history shapes her and her actions. She meditates on the nature of violence, with some surprising grace. 

As she progresses towards her final mission, there’s a fair amount the player can learn with her, and at the game’s conclusion, I felt like she served well as a guide through a fever dream, and I had a thing or two to chew on thematically. Artis Impact does not shy away from representing the micro- (and forthright) aggressions that women face daily. I was exhausted early on. I get that Akane is fictional, but her perseverance reminded me of the fortitude of everyday women who strive for a place at the table, who have to prove themselves day in and day out to a harsh, patriarchal reality. 

Artis Impact won’t wow most players outside of its art direction. Most will feel outside the inside joke. As I played this game on stream, I asked what could possibly describe this game in a nutshell or how I would recommend it to anyone. Matt, editor for The Hard Drive, offered this: “Artis Impact is if NieR was a comedy.” If you start to pick at this description, it gets absolutely impossible to comprehend. And that’s why it’s the best one-liner for  the game. Where NieR: Automata gets serious and muses on what actions define humanity, Artis Impact tosses in an insecure, gasping man, horrified by a conversation with a woman and overwhelmed by Akane’s beauty. 

It’s a game created to be exactly what its sole developer had in mind, which I think does make the experience all that more expressive but solitary. The credits emphasise that Mas was truly the solo developer behind it, and honestly, it shows. It is what it is. There’s nothing like it. An editor would have produced an entirely different, and potentially sterile version of a game that prioritises “art for art’s sake” over meticulous world-building or half a dozen fistfights with animals. Artis Impact is undeniably itself, unrestrained in personality and artistic presence. It doesn’t care what a player wants or expects; it only asks that you trust it, and I am glad that I did.