Review: Matsuro Palette Presents a Surprisingly Beautiful Story

Between its nostalgic art style and uniquely “free Japanese indie horror game” style of characterization, playing Matsuro Palette felt like taking a time machine back to the mid-to-late-2000s. Though the gameplay loop is simple enough, it truly shines with its bittersweet story. Considering its price point and how quickly you can play through the game, this is definitely something I recommend if you want something quick and easy to get through on a weekend.

In Matsuro Palette, you play as a painter who must finish painting a cursed portrait of a girl. You’re not the first painter who’s been tasked with this project though. Several others have attempted to finish her painting, but they all died due to the subject’s violent temper. Drew an apple for her but didn’t peel it first? Bye. Drew something she wanted where she wanted, but used the wrong color? See you later. In order to satisfy the painting, the painter must rely on hints from both previous victims and the girl herself.

The game’s divided into two main parts: exploration and painting. When the day starts, you must explore the various rooms for items to sketch. The interesting thing about Matsuro Palette is that the majority of the sketches are always in the background already. You just might not notice their significance until later. For example, one of the sketches you’ll need is a mirror and you’ve probably already seen said mirror during your previous explorations. It just never becomes important until later, when the girl wants you to include that in a painting. After deciding what you want to draw, as well as the order you want to draw it in, you need to pick a color. The color wheel spins through the air, requiring you to click it at the right timing. Fortunately, this isn’t the difficult part.

As a whole, the game takes about two to three hours to complete. This depends on how much trouble you might have with the painting’s requests. Two of the levels gave me some difficulty, especially since I misunderstood what the girl wanted from me. If you game over though, the game doesn’t force you to start over from the very beginning. It simply places you back at the painting with all of the sketches already in your inventory. Since a huge part of Matsuro Palette is collecting all of the different deaths, it makes sense that the game would be really nice to you. I tried to avoid guide usage for my review, but since Matsuro Palette has been out for years at this point, it’s not hard to find walkthroughs on YouTube or Japanese sites if you’re not sure how to proceed.

Considering the sheer number of deaths in the game, you might need to pull out a guide to complete the death gallery. There are over forty different types of death in this game, with a unique one for each way you can potentially tick off the girl. For example, I mentioned earlier that the girl gets mad at you if you present her an apple but you don’t peel it first. Your punishment for that lapse in judgment is her skinning you alive. The deaths aren’t very gruesome, visually speaking. This is because the person who dies in these endings looks like a chalk outline at a crime scene. So it shouldn’t be too difficult to look at, even if you’re not the biggest fan of gore.

While the gameplay loop is easy, painting the girl actually isn’t the point of the game. The story is. I personally really enjoyed it. While I shouldn’t be surprised considering this is a cursed painting we’re talking about here, I was still a little taken aback by how sad the story became after you start to learn more about the painting’s past. After I beat the game and it kicked me back to the main menu, I had to sit there for a few minutes just kind of taking it all in. It really reminds me of similar older-looking indie Japanese horror games (think Ib, The Witch’s House) in that the game isn’t so difficult that you spend entire days on it, but the story will stay with you for much longer than you expect.

Speaking of retro horror games, the art style is reminiscent of Touhou Project, and this impression is accelerated by the girl’s design. There’s something very charming about how simple it is; it’s not bad, but it looking like amateur fanart really adds to how unpolished the game feels. That is a compliment, not a complaint or criticism. I also really enjoyed the music, as well as the fact that the entire game is pretty much in monochrome. For the longest time, the only colors that appear are whatever you choose to place in the canvas. So getting to see more color as the story progresses had a lot more impact.

There is one thing about Matsuro Palette that I didn’t particularly like and it’s that the game occasionally kicked me back to the main menu after certain chapters. This is an intentional choice rather than a bug. It didn’t happen after every day, thankfully, but it did happen enough that it started to become grating to press a few extra buttons to get back into the atelier. I was wondering if Matsuro Palette had an episodic release, like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 did. But from my research, I don’t believe SleepingMuseum did that.

With a charming aesthetic that hearkens back to the mid-2000s and a gripping story, Matsuro Palette really surprised me with how much I liked it. It’s short and sweet, just difficult enough to provide a challenge, but easy enough that you can beat it in one day if you wish. While I don’t think I’d like a sequel of it, it did leave me wanting to see more between the painter and the girl.

Matsuro Palette, aka Death Palette, is readily available on the PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC, and mobile devices.