Mira’s Brush (PC) – Review

When the evil lord Colonel Blunt brute-forced his way into the castle and stole the color crystal from the empress, an ordinary girl Mira comes to rescue and is tasked with the duty of restoring colors to the Chromaland.

Using her magic brush, she can steal the colors and stencils of the original enemies featured in the overly colorful world of Chromaland, which is also the most basic way of getting around foes. Supposedly aspired by the art of painting, Mira’s unique method of rendering enemies unharmed is stealing their color and leaving them in the form of monochrome. That way she can touch, jump or ride on them depending on where she wants to go next.

Mira’s Brush seemingly intends to attract players with its intense use of widely ranged color palettes, gimmicky and bizarre slew of enemies in various shapes and sizes, and ill-conceived attempts at establishing funny dialogues. It also features a total of over 60 stages stuffed with tricky puzzles, tons of collectibles, and hidden routes and secrets. But all of those attractions can be reduced to nothing when you consider one very plain reason. Again, the colors which are supposed to be defining characteristics of the game, are also the main reason why it can be an unpleasant experience for players. The over application of colors on highly pixelated world objects just doesn’t feel fit together.

It’s not something worth complaining about, but for a game that wants players to read the dialogue, it can be said that the sudden zoom in/out and bumpy camera shifts are not making the best environment for convenient reading. Occasionally, the dialogues will skip automatically in spite of the fact that it asked you to skip manually with a press of the button at the start. The confusion roots at the very beginning of the game where you’re asked to choose one of four available slots to save your progress. It was not particularly hard or anything, but it’s the first thing you see when you open the game for the first time, and it is kind of badly designed, and the layout is not pretty to look at is the foreshadowing that the visuals of the rest will not be to anyone’s satisfaction.

You can also expect to be equally disappointed by the controls, especially with jumping. It’s not as simple to figure out how high you can jump as you will find inconsistencies in the execution process and positioning can also take a slippery turn for the movement is too fast when leaping. There is a free demo on Steam if you wanted to check it out for yourself.