Nate Hermanson
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read

REVIEW: Été has a few rough edges but manages to delight with its zen creative expression

I've always admired the ability of others to create stunning visual art, transforming simple lines and brushstrokes into vivid scenes of things I could only ever picture in my head.

Good thing there are games like Été out there to make it possible for a non-artist like me.

Été offers players a chance to slip into the mind of an artist. A visitor in Montreal, the city appears to you as a canvas that needs pigmenting. You explore, filling it out with your paintbrush, and in turn it rewards you with inspiration: the likenesses of people, objects and scenes discovered as you trek across the city can then be used in a simple 3D object stamping mechanic to create unique compositions of your own.

It's got a few rough edges, but the potential of its creative tools is without question.

Let's paint you a picture, shall we?

An in-game screenshot of Été. In the middle of a white void, a path of color is painted up to a building. The rest is left devoid of color and painted in plain white. Construction barriers line the street and a colorful shop lined with vines pops out of the middle of the scene.

Just the Facts

Developer: Impossible

Publisher: Impossible

Platform(s): PC

Price: $24.99

Release Date: July 23, 2024

Review key provided by publisher via popagenda.

Paint what you know

Based out of Montreal and founded in 2016, Impossible is a small team that found inspiration in their hometown to craft this unique debut project about creative expression. With the support of the Canada Media Fund — supported by the Canadian government to help create original Canadian content — the team grew quickly and their ideas became fully realized. After making waves in previous Day of the Devs and Wholesome Games showcases, Été is now available to the world.

Part creative tool, part painting-focused exploration game, Été drops players into the paint-flecked shoes of a budding artist who takes a trip to Montreal for the summer to find inspiration on its historic streets and see how far their art can take them. From the outset, Impossible makes it clear this game has a lot more of a narrative voice than you'd expect. With a cinematic opening cutscene, synced up to the beat of its playful classical music track, Été establishes a calm and cozy urban adventure that sees its protagonist finding their foothold as a painter on the "mean" streets of Montreal.

As you wander through this new city, represented plainly as near-empty white voids that the player fills in with color as they go, Été tells a ton of small stories. Within the alleyways, the flower fields in the park, and the railway that's been converted into a socialist commune, Été hides low-key character arcs that require the assistance of an artist's gentle touch to be pushed along. There are kids playing a game of street hockey who need a poster. There's an author rejected by a local bookstore who needs a sublime book cover to convince them to shelve it. There's a florist who likes birds and commissions a series of paintings most fowl to populate the bird cages she uses to decorate her store.

But then underneath the light and quirky, Été also hides some powerfully sincere stories, too: a man challenging himself to imagine the look of the native land that Montreal sits on, Tiohtià:ke, envisioning what it looks like where Indigenous sovereignty has been restored. A commune looking for a flag to represent the strength of its values. And, of course, the ongoing storyline that carries through all of it: an artist finding their purpose in a society that increasingly has decided art is only valuable as a product, rather than an expression of one's self.

It's not overt in the way it tells any one of these stories, instead opting for leaning on the juxtaposition of the cozy watercolor aesthetic and the somewhat surprising plainspokenness of its characters. The characters feel like the people you'd run into in your city. They curse, they mutter strange offhand remarks — they are people and not "wholesome" caricatures. It's light and it's low stakes, but it's familiar and frank. This is the kind of game where you might ask a tutorializing question like "Who should I ask about paintings?" and get something like "Fuck if I know" back.

There's a lot I respected about Été's story, but it could feel pretty flat at times, particularly the game's main storyline. It involves you partnering with a rich woman who falls in love with your style and works with you to find a home for it all. The way Été ends felt simultaneously satisfying and anticlimactic. It honors all the work you've done up to that point, the relationships you've built and the city you've explored... but, for me, it also kind of landed with an abrupt thud and never took the next step into something genuinely moving or engaging.

Maybe that has more to do with the fact that, not unlike in my real life, I struggled to find worth in the work I was creating. I struggled to feel like I was making anything worthwhile, anything to connect to, so I didn't buy into the artistic impact my character was having on this city. But that's an issue to be worked out in therapy and not in this review. In the end, the power of seeing art impact the lives of a city full of people is undeniably cool, even if most of it was just me fulfilling silly requests.

An in-game screenshot of Été. A woman with short red hair, a green t-shirt, and blue overalls gestures inquisitively. A messy bed with striped sheets and red pillows sits behind her, just under a window. Her name is Marianne and she says "Oh, an easel! That must have taken most of your luggage. Are you a painter?" Dialogue options for the player read: "A world-famous painter." "Not really, I'm just an amateur." and "I think of myself as a color whisperer."

Creation and exploration

Été's gameplay comes through in two major forms: a creative art tool you use to stamp 3D objects onto a canvas, both for your own creative fulfillment and for specific commission requests, and a kind of reverse PowerWash Simulator-esque exploration game that sees you filling a whitewashed world with color. One side truly delighted me, another frustrated me; both came together to create a mostly fulfilling experience.

Let's start with the exploring. When you drop into Impossible's version of Montreal, you'll find yourself surrounded by a whiteness, a void waiting to be painted in. You've got a limited pool of paint you can use to fill the world back in with color — you don't choose the colors to paint it all back in with, a la Chicory, instead restoring the world's established colors one object at a time. As each object is painted, it gets added to a collection of 3D objects that are used to create your paintings: so, yes, you're literally taking inspiration from the world around you to create your own original works.

Exploring and puzzling out what is even around you was probably my favorite part of the experience. Entering an alleyway, brushing some paint around the scene, and uncovering a Japanese garden in the middle of this tightly packed neighborhood or some other surprise was always a delight and it scratched that "fill in all the gaps" itch that PowerWash can scratch. And Impossible's incredible watercolor aesthetic made this feel like walking through the most beautiful 3D zen coloring book.

My initial note was "it's PowerWash Sim meets The Unfinished Swan" and it remained true to the very end.

Impossible's incredible watercolor aesthetic made this feel like walking through the most beautiful 3D zen coloring book.

Once you're finished exploring though, it's time to get to work painting. The creative tools are more like collage than any sort of literal painting, as you place and stamp 3D objects onto a canvas, twirling, resizing, changing the color of, and generally manipulating each item however you see fit to match your artistic vision. Think an evolved, watercolor version of something like KidPix rather than something you can freeform paint with brushstrokes. It's a fun and mostly easy-to-grasp system, with some frustrating limitations that I'll lay out in a moment.

You're free to create on your own, but there are also commission quests you can take that invite you to create unique pieces with specific requested elements. These prompts offer you some interesting and creative jumping off points.

My experience was marred by the review process, as I found myself plowing through the game instead of stopping to smell the roses, how this game deserves to be played. Its structure and narrative intention feel built to be enjoyed by someone taking their time, by someone ready and willing to lose themselves in studying the details of the environment or in decorating their bedroom with the game's in-depth decoration tools.

By playing it the way I did, the game's sore spots were all the more apparent and its slower pace and more laidback narrative ended up less appreciated in the end.

An in-game screenshot of Été. It depicts the decorating interface, represented with a large grid overlay that helps players orient items placed into the scene. A bedroom is being assembled. A green chair sits next to a vanity table, which is next to a standing mirror. In the middle, a victorian bed with an elaborate backboard and green sheets can be seen. To the right of that, a dresser holds a telephone and table fan. A brown couch flanks the room and an empty picture frame can be seen hanging above the bed.

You missed a spot

To start my surprising list of grievances, despite comfortably exceeding the game's recommended system requirements, Été was a bit of a technical ordeal in my time with it. There were consistent frame rate issues in most of the game's bigger environments, there were problems with freezing where the game would just stop completely as the time of day changed and the world shifted around me, and loading in general was probably the worst I've experienced in the modern era, with some loading screens taking up to 3-4 minutes. There were also smaller, more common glitches, like characters clipping into each other, dialogue boxes that'd clip into the world, and crashes.

Since these issues were bigger than usual, they warranted comment. But a post-launch update shows many of these problems are known, and Impossible has pushed through a couple of patches since the release date.

Outside of that, I also wasn't entirely in love with Été's creative tool. There were a few things I felt were missing that could have benefited the experience.

There's a looseness to Été's tools that seems to be encouraging you to be okay with making mistakes. But it instead just felt frustrating.

There were no tools that helped with composition, no snapping or easy mirroring of objects already placed into the composition. You couldn't easily search through the hundreds of stamps you amassed to find the object you're thinking of, despite each stamp being named and categorized. There was a part of the user interface that popped up over a bit of the bottom of the canvas and you couldn't minimize it, making it difficult to make sure the entire piece is cohesive.

There's a looseness to Été's tools that seems to be encouraging you to be okay with making mistakes. But it instead just felt frustrating that I could never get the tools to make what I was picturing in my head, knowing it was possible but not wanting to fiddle with the tools excessively to get things quite right. I'd have ideas for paintings, go to make them, run into an issue with rotating a piece just so or accidentally altering the entire canvas and struggling to get it back in place. In the end, I'd often feel unhappy with the finished product because of these issues, and that's no fun.

This isn't to say that I didn't find any success in my artwork in Été — far from it. I actually came away really satisfied with the ways I managed to be creative within those restraints, but it was always a struggle to create within its tools, and I don't know if that's what Impossible was seeking to achieve here.

An in-game screenshot of Été. A front yard is partially colored in with paint splotches. The things that are painted in, like a planter, some rows of flowers, and a tree, have paint bubbles floating above them. The spaces that aren't painted in are simply left uncolored in plain white. At the end of the yard, there's a short path and a bus stop waiting.

Été clearly has something special inside of it. Despite a few technical hiccups and limitations, its bones are loaded with some genuine creativity. It can spark inspiration and joy in the process of slowing down, taking in the details, exploring a community, and expressing yourself with an approachable (but imperfect) creative tool. But a few strange decisions hold it back from ever achieving the brilliance it desires. What's there is good, but it could have been great.

For those willing to embrace its imperfections, there's plenty of beauty to discover, so consider dabbling in Été's watercolors and witnessing the stunning artwork of Impossible's take on Montreal.

Video Games Are Good and Été is . . . GOOD. (7/10)

+ a modern narrative with surprising depth, relaxing exploration aspect, watercolor aesthetic feels like being in a painting

- technical issues cause headaches, creating paintings is an exercise in patience, story can be a little dry at times

The key art for Été. A landscape watercolor portrait. A building housing a watertower is on the left with a train passing in front of it. A passenger flight can be seen overhead. In the middle, an easel with the games title in fancy script can be seen. Paint bubbles float around the easel, along with a paint brush. To the right, a grand statue of an angel in green can be seen gesturing with an arm to the sky. The statue is a famous Canadian statue known as the George-Étienne Cartier Monument.

Thanks for reading this Video Games Are Good review. If you're interested in learning more about our review rubric, click here! Wanna join our Discord, where you can discuss reviews and get early views at upcoming articles? Click here! Thank you for supporting our coverage!