Best Viewed Up Close: Oil on Canvas

About the Game

Best Viewed Up Close is an interactive oil painting. Over 1,000 physical canvases, painted by hand, photographed, and brought to life as a meadow you can explore.

You are the guy with the plan. The meadow comes out, the gravel goes down, the concrete goes over it, and by Sunday there is a parking spot where all this used to be. Boots on, gloves on, no shirt, sunburn already going. Then the grass got tall. Or you got small. Either way, the job is on hold, and the meadow has you exactly where it wants you.

There is no combat. There are no fail states. There is a world you were about to erase without ever once looking at it. Time to look.

A meadow made of paint

Wander a Pacific Northwest meadow rendered in thick, textured oil. Climb foxglove stalks. Ride a drifting petal across the pond. Catch a lift from a bee to the sunflower heads. Every region is its own palette, and every surface is a real brushstroke.

Meet what the concrete would cover

The meadow is full of small lives, and every one of them is in the footprint. A beetle rolling its prize down the gravel path. Aphids in a line under a leaf. A spider rebuilding her web after rain. Notice them, get close, and they join your field journal, where every entry is a crop of a real canvas.

And the robin

Sometimes a shadow crosses the grass and everything small goes quiet. Nothing here will hurt you. But down at this size you are the small thing now, and one of the neighbors is the size of a building. Earn the last page of your journal by getting close.

Made by hand, every frame

This is not a filter or a shader. Over 1,000 real oil paintings went into this world, and more are on the easel right now.

• An interactive oil painting: every sprite and scene hand-painted on canvas

• Play a shrunken man, dish gloves and all, in the meadow he was about to pave

• Gentle exploration at miniature scale, no combat, no fail states

• A field journal of painted entries to fill, and to share

• One continuous meadow across distinct painted regions

The parking spot can wait. Oil on canvas.