Hello. Last night I almost leapt out of bed and ran into the street wearing just my pyjamas, grabbing anyone I could find and loudly yelling, “Apple Arcade! It’s this new thing on iOS! First month’s free! ” I had been playing Painty Mob for about five minutes by that point. Now I’m several hours deep. The only difference is this: now I would yell even louder.
What is Painty Mob? God that is hard to say really. Years from now there will be college courses designed to answer that question. People will write dissertations and check out inter-library-loan books on Painty Mob and write, “Agree!” in the margins next to the really clever lines. Anyway, take a phone screen, held landscape. Imagine a line dividing it down the middle. The left half? That’s for moving your thumb to run around. The right half? That’s for sending out bursts of paint.
So what is Painty Mob? It’s a game with a mob and you paint them. The more of the mob you paint the higher your score. But the mob chases you and tries to kill you. And there are bombs and other problems. It’s all over so quickly.
Painty Mob – Apple Arcade Watch on YouTube
What else is Painty Mob, though? It is a sensation, delivered through the art and up via the screen and the thumbs. It is a softness, a squishiness, a rounded, inflated world of flat colour and emoticon grins that you race across blasting everything with emergency yellow, with hot coral, with Dulux Heartwood. The world is inflated to the point where it might burst any second. Bang. It’s done. You’re done. Painty Mob is done. Back, inevitably, to Painty Mob.