The Master’s Pupil is a hand-painted puzzle adventure game set inside the eye of Claude Monet, one of the most celebrated artists of all time.
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The Master’s Pupil was inspired by Claude Monet
In The Master’s Pupil, you play as a pupil of Monet’s who is tasked with helping him complete his paintings. You must solve puzzles and navigate through Monet’s eyeball, which is represented as a surreal and beautiful landscape.
The game took Australian indie game developer and artist Pat Naoum seven years to create. The entire game is hand-painted in a style reflective of the Impressionist’s artistry, which became more abstract as his vision deteriorated from cataracts.
Naoum has said in interviews that he is fascinated by Impressionists because to him, “they were always on the edge of what is full abstraction”.
Naoum, who lives in Sydney, spent over 2,000 hours hand painting The Master’s Pupil with real acrylics on real paper (“oils would have stunk out my apartment”) before digitizing his creations. “I used a film negative scanner. This allowed me to get all the detail in that painted texture,” Naoum said in an interview. He even coded the game himself.
In an interview with ABC RN’s The Art Show, Naoum said “[The paintings] were a way of experiencing [Monet’s] life because so much of his artwork was integrated with where he was at the time”.
While playing the game, participants learn about the artist’s personal triumphs and tragedies. At the end of level 7, one of Naoum’s favorite moments in the game is when Camille, Monet’s first wife, passes away at 32. Monet sat by her deathbed and wrote to a friend that he could only think about the purple hue of her lips and how he would mix paint to recreate that exact shade in real life.
The Master’s Pupil is available now on Steam for PC and Mac and on Nintendo Switch, with Xbox and PlayStation versions on the way.
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