Nintendo’s biggest new IP, Splatoon, features squids who can turn into humans (or humans into squids) as they blast each other with paint and the arena with brightly colored paint in an attempt to capture as much territory as possible. It sounds childish, but it’s just a façade for a heart pumping three minutes of action. It’s a great spin on the shooter genre, and one that consumers actually are responding well to.
Well, recently I wanted to go to this museum. I saw ads for it in the subways and on bus stops and figured that of course I must go. The neon green ad was enough to pique my interest.
So I went in expecting an art exhibition and left realizing that I had actually just gone through a real-life level of Splatoon. It was a multi-tiered stage, which obviously deviates a bit from the more open levels in the game, but of course a little change couldn’t hurt.
Splattered ink everywhere was the main point of comparison, but the plethora of neon colors definitely played a role.
The exhibition itself was actually quite cool. He used a traditional Chinese art form (ink) and used it in an untraditional way (with bricks.) He asked a simple question: why is the brush the most accepted way to deliver ink to canvas? And why must we use canvas? So he slapped paint on bricks, and slapped bricks on anything he could find.
But in the end, the main takeaway was this was the best level Splatoon never had.
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