REVIEW: ‘Spray Paint Simulator’ Is Easy To Flow State With

Spray Paint Simulator from developer North Star Video Games and publisher Whitethorn Games is exactly as advertised: a simulator game where you take a spray paint blaster through seven levels to give new life to some old parts of town. With simple, familiar controls, there are a few minor aggravations, but overall, it’s an easy game to sink mindless hours into.

Overall, Spray Paint Simulator is easy to pick up and get started with. The first level, a car, helps demonstrate not only the controls but also the fact that the environments can be large and are completely pre-rendered. The car sits on one driveway, but you can walk around a whole neighborhood and vandalize it with paint if you want to. While Spray Paint Simulator occasionally encounters save issues, all of your paint will remain present forever. Or at least, until you finish the level. Everything resets if you restart it after finishing.

Before you can actually paint anything, you first have to mask everything that’s not being painted with paint and tape. This is a simulator, so you must take every step in the process seriously (you can skip the masking portions, but you won’t receive payment for them). The one qualm to be had with the masking portion of levels is that to mask sections of the level; you have to go into your inventory, buy rolls of paper and tape, place them physically into the environment, and then continuously pick more up from the ground as you use and deplete your stock.

You can only purchase paper and tape in increments of a certain amount at once, and the quantities available are uneven, so you’ll continually have to estimate how much more you’ll need and buy more as you wrap things. Surely, it’s somewhat realistic of a process, but it’s not like you’re holding the paper and tape in your hands once you pick it up off the floor. It simply displays a meter in the bottom right corner of the screen. So the extra step of having to buy more continuously, put it on the floor, and refill the meter feels tediously like an extra step.

Spray Paint Simulator has some technical hang-ups, but getting into a flow state is easy.

Refilling your paint has a similar process, but it feels more natural. Once everything is masked, you take out an electric paint gun from your inventory, which you also, oddly, have to place on the ground before putting it in your hands. The Spray Paint Simulator informs you of the color paint you need to use at any given time during the campaign.

You can then purchase a bucket from the inventory, place it on the ground, fill your paint gun, and start spraying. Your paint will eventually run out, and after a longer period, your paint gun’s battery will also need to be replaced. It’s smart planning to try placing the paint bucket and extra batteries close by so you don’t have to run across the level to refill.

While painting, there are three spray modes: vertical, horizontal, and straight-on. A quick button click switches between them. Another button activates a continuous spray, although it is somewhat temperamental and may not work on the first or third try. Another locks you in place to “aim” and changes the right stick from rotating the camera to rotating your spraying arm. You can also jump and adjust your stance to three crouching levels to help reach every nook and cranny.

The button you’ll likely press most regularly in Spray Paint Simulator highlights all of the surfaces yet to be painted (or masked). Every surface has its own individual percentage meter indicating how close it is to being completely painted. Since every object is 3D, you’ll have to get creative to make sure you approach and spray every angle of every surface before it dings completely.

There’s a generous leniency to the 100 percent meter—there’s a certain small percentage of surface area that can remain unpainted before an object registers as complete and automatically fills in the rest of the way. The amount that can remain unpainted is proportional, so the larger an object, the less perfect you have to be in spraying every last pixel. This isn’t to say you don’t have to scour certain objects to find spots you miss; it just means you won’t ever have to search for one single pixel you didn’t spray.

The cherry picker is a game-changer once you unlock it.

The last button in your tool kit is a flashlight. It’s not especially helpful, especially because so many of the environments are already over-lit. Light effects colorization, and in a game that’s all about ensuring everything is consistently colored, it can make it hard to tell sometimes whether you’ve already painted over a spot or not, especially when you have the highlighter on.

To paint every last spot in a level, you will have to use an array of traversal tools, including ladders, scaffolding, climbing shoes, and, eventually, a cherry picker. There is no dedicated button for climbing ladders, so occasionally, while going up and down scaffolding, especially in Spray Paint Simulator, it can become unclear whether you mean to go up or down. It’s a minor inconvenience, but in a game that’s all about getting into a flow state, any disruption like this can become annoying.

The cherry picker is a fun new wrinkle once you unlock it. It’s a bit challenging to navigate, but a map at the bottom of the screen indicates which direction you’re facing and where the basket is pointed at all times, so you can get oriented right away if needed. Additionally, since you will need to get in and out frequently to refill paint, it’s convenient that a simple button press will always return you to exactly where you were when you exited, without requiring a reset each time.

Spray Paint Simulator has some technical gaps that keep the game from flowing just right, but on the whole, it’s a well-conceived simulator that can easily keep you flowing for hours.

Spray Paint Simulator is available now on Xbox Series X|S and PC.