Review: Behind the Frame is a Surprising Artistic Experience

Most creatives working in a non-creative setting have dreamed of making it out on their own through making things with their own hands. At first look, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery gives players that experience–but only for an hour. The game then welcomes you into the unknown, leaving you with no idea where it could be going until the very end. However, the end will leave you with a satisfaction so good, it’s well worth the journey.

Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery is a mystery puzzle game developed by Silver Lining Studio, published by Akupara Games and Akatsuki Taiwan. In Behind the Frame, you play an unnamed painter applying to have her work accepted into a New York gallery. As the player, you assist the painter with her morning tasks, like eating breakfast and typing up a resume, to help her get ready for a day of sketching and painting. However, the journey truly begins when you start to paint your canvas, and realize some of the colors shown in your reference drawing are missing from your palette. While looking for them, you must complete challenging puzzles that reveal hidden, endearing notes written by a stranger, creating an even greater mystery for the painter. If that’s not enough, while all this is happening you also find yourself growing more and more curious about your next door neighbor.

As you point and click around the screen, you soon begin to realize that some paintings shown on the walls of the painter’s apartment don’t belong to her, and come to understand that the key to finding the missing paints is to try and figure out the story of each mystery painting. 

While I started Behind the Frame  expecting a relaxing game about art (which still is for the most part), Behind the Frame caught me slipping, providing me instead with a blossoming love story, time travel, and an element (or should I say sprinkle) of the supernatural.

Before writing in the industry, I was desperate to find indie games, not understanding how to find or look up what gems might have gone under my radar. Now, privileged with that knowledge, I feel overwhelmed with the saturation of incredible games that I see showcased, released, or under the indie genre tabs on gaming platforms. Feeling too frozen to choose, I often find myself replaying old games, or repeating the cycle of gaming online until I get sick of the toxicity–which is how this year has been. However, the 2021 Day of the Devs showcase had an impressive list of participants, and also introduced me to Silver Lining Studio’s Behind the Frame. Immediately, the game’s trailer sucked me in with its gentle animation and cozy story, and I was excited for August to roll around for a chance to try it out.

After finishing Behind the Frame, I found myself still enamored by the game’s art style and plot twists, and my uneventful year of games took a 180, and I finally feel ready to get back to different titles. Marketed as a comfy, warm-hearted story of an artist trying to live up to a dream, the game throws you in a different direction, giving the player a sense that the main character is taking a look in the past to whoever owned the apartment before her. However, Behind the Frame always proves to be more than what it seems, and quickly drove me to another loop that had me yelling “WHAAAT?”

With a mind like mine–obsessed with needing to control what will happen in my future both in and outside of games–Behind the Frame brings back the joy in surprises, a feeling I thought I’d lost. Not knowing what color paints I would get next, having no clue how these random hand written notes would come together, even trying to put together the canvas, and jumping into the unknown in so many little side pockets of story was all part of the fun and the mystery. Playing this relatively short game was a delight, something I can’t compare to online games where the result is always I die or I leave because of exhausting players ruining it for others. The alone time I had with the puzzles gave me a similar feeling to a self care day; working the brain muscles for fun as you would do doing a sudoku puzzle during breakfast, or knitting yourself a nice project–completely free from those gamer rage moments everyone feels every so often.

I have left Behind the Frame refreshed, awake from a personal slow year of games, and excited to see what Silver Lining Studio might have in the future.

Behind the Frame is available August 25 on Steam, iOS, and Google Play,