Free Painting

Free Painting was one of those simple Flash games you'd find in the mid 2000s. It didn't have a story or a score. It was just there, a quiet little program on a website full of more frantic games. You loaded it up when you wanted to do something with your hands but didn't want to think too hard.

You control a cursor, nothing more. Your job is to fill in a black and white line drawing, a scene of a girl sitting with a cat in a living room. You pick a color from a palette along the bottom, then click on an area to fill it. The paint spreads to the borders of each shape, which keeps things neat. You can switch colors as often as you like, experimenting with a blue rug or a purple cat. There's no timer, no wrong answers, and the difficulty is nonexistent. It's a slow, methodical process of deciding what each part of the world should be. The game feels like a peaceful, private exercise in making choices without consequence.