My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book (Nintendo Switch Review)

Yes, really.

The irony is, I bought this expecting to do a tongue-in-cheek review about the lack of clear objectives, character sprites who were too large, etc. A fun, playful gag review to lighten the mood and put a smile on the faces of my readers. This would be exactly the type of “only IGC” review I used to do back in the day. Then I actually played My Cute Unicorns, and now I have no choice but to do an actual review. This might actually be one of the worst games on Switch. It’s certainly the worst artistic game I’ve ever played. It’s every bit as fun as coloring with the world’s most controlling child. “NO, YOU CAN’T COLOR IT LIKE THAT! PLAY BY MY RULES!” What do I mean? Well..

Here’s six of the thirty pictures you can color. Let’s choose one.

Aww, look at that. Adorable. Okay, I want to make her hair rainbow colored. There’s about eight strands of hair, so I want it to be eight different colors. I want her hair to look like she survived an explosion at the Lucky Charms factory. Sadly, My Cute Unicorns isn’t down with the rainbows. Here, I selected the one strand the cursor shows in the picture and used the autofill tool and..

It painted three strands. That’s not a one-off thing either. It auto-fills colors all over, and there’s no option not to. Why would it do that? I honestly couldn’t tell you since I can’t imagine ANYONE would want a coloring game like this. But, that’s how the game works. In theory, you could do it manually. If you start to paint one area manually, you can rub all over the screen, but only the matching sections that would be filled in automatically will be painted until you lift your finger to do another section. Okay, that’s the solution to the auto fill issue, right? Not so fast. If the “paired sections” or whatever you want to call them are actually next to each-other, like in the next picture, it’s nearly impossible to stay in the lines no matter what tool you use. In this next picture, I wanted to paint one strand of hair with the sparkly space blue. After multiple attempts of just barely poking the very bottom of the strand, this is how close I could come to staying in lines and only doing the one strand:

It’s at this point I realized that my gag review was turning into a review of one of the most pointless, awful, terrible games I’ve played in eleven years of game reviews. And it gets worse!!

What if I want to do the horn multiple different colors? Too bad, so sad. In fact, not only does it color the whole horn one way, but it also fills in the inner-ear’s color with the same color you choose for the horn.

Now look, I’m a 33-year-old train wreck of a person who chose this because it was on sale for a $1.99 and I thought my followers would get a jolly good laugh out of me playing around with a coloring book on Switch that was clearly made for young children. But, what young child wants to have anyone dictate how they MUST fill in colors in a coloring book, digital or otherwise? Isn’t the whole fun with this type of thing supposed to be going bonkers? Making colors that are gaudy for the sake of it? Having rainbow colored horns and hair, or crazy eye colors? It’s a coloring game that restricts you in so many ways that it becomes a rip-off. Take a look at the 30 second clip in this tweet:

I would think even pre-schoolers would be frustrated with My Cute Unicorn’s restrictiveness. It doesn’t encourage creativity. It stymies it. I’m flabbergasted that I bought this game to make my readers laugh and pretend like I’ve lost my mind, thinking there is no possible way a developer could fuck up a coloring book. But, come on! You can’t even make the twinkle in their eyes red? The only work around I could find was just spamming spray paint on the screen over and over, then starting the project from there. But that’s crap, because why wouldn’t you just want to have a fill-in-the-blanks canvas in a video coloring book? It’s a safe bet someone who buys one is signing up to do every strand of hair as its own color, without the game insisting you do multiple strands the same color. I want a rainbow colored horn with blood in their eyes, and the game said no. Like I said, it’s like being stuck coloring with a bratty kid who takes crayons away from you if you don’t do it their way.

This was the best I could do when I made a good faith effort to make a pretty unicorn. The sparkly space background I had to finger paint in. There’s no fill option for those colors for absolutely no reason. You’ll note that I couldn’t make the right wing match the left wing, and also the color I filled in the right wing also automatically filled in the mouth the same color. Wings and mouths are basically the same thing. It’s all magical flying murder horse, right?

So, what’s even the point? This apparently started as an Android game, and maybe it’s more flexible with the options on there. Don’t know. Don’t care. I didn’t buy it on Android. I bought it on Switch. I don’t think even a young child would enjoy this. I think the first time they try to fill in one color in one location and it automatically does the same color in a completely different location, and nothing can be done about it, the kid is going to be frustrated. Your only option is to manually paint it, but it COULD bleed over the line, especially if it’s set up so the two strands will in automatically the same color. So, this game I bought as a joke review? The joke’s on me, because I spent six hours with it trying to find something nice to say about it, and all I can say is not even Voldemort did unicorns this dirty.

My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book is not IGC Approved

My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book was developed by Soroka Games
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$1.99 (normally $4.99) colored over the lines in the making of this review.

That was the best Sweetie I could do in this program. Finer points would have been nice.