Été is a weird 'painting' game, and I love the concept

Oct 27, 2023

Montreal becomes a work of art in new game Été.

The city of Montreal is your actual canvas in Été [pronounced ay·tay], a new video game that enables you to paint your story. This relaxing puzzle game will bring out the artist in you, that's for sure.

It feels like we're about to embrace a new wave of interesting, artistic indie games, as my feature on the best art directed games from the PlayStation showcase revealed. Été was announced at this week's Day of the Devs: Summer Game Fest Edition 2023 and looks, well, lovely.

The idea is to splash watercolour around the screen and explore the city, making friends with the game's art community, solving puzzles and building your own unique story. Get an idea of how it will play in the gameplay trailer below.

"We’re excited to finally share our lovingly crafted depiction of our hometown with the rest of the world," said Lazlo Bonin, creative director of Été. "We look forward to players exploring and painting to their heart's content in this whimsical summer fantasy!"

Été is the debut game from Impossible, a new Montreal-based indie studio founded in 2016 by Bonin, the developer of award-winning Unity tools such as Bolt and Chronos. (Read my interview with Anna Hollinrake on setting up her studio for more inspiration.)

I love how Été looks to recreate the feeling of painting a watercolour landscape, and turns it into game design. As well as exploring the city and painting the world you can collect stamps and use these to create artwork with "total freedom". The game is scheduled for release on Steam in early 2024, so we have time to wait, but I'm already in love with its aesthetic.

Discover more games like Été in our list of the best PS5 games, and if you want to follow in Bonin's footsteps and make your own games, read our Unreal Engine 5 review and discover the best laptops for game development.

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Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.

Ian Dean is Editor, Art & Design at Creativebloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and leading video game title Official PlayStation Magazine. In his early career he wrote for music and film magazines including Uncut and SFX. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on AI, digital art and video game art and tech, and more to Creative Bloq, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5. He's also a keen Cricut user and laser cutter fan, and is currently crafting on Glowforge and xTools M1.