Death Palette (or Matsuro) is a Adventure Horror game by Sleeping Museum, created for mobile devices.
A nameless artist who's deep in a slump suddenly receives a surprise visit from a friend, who arrived with a gift for them, a peculiar painting displaying a splotch of black paint. However, after a short (and strange) conversation, the artist's friend suddenly falls dead, a mysterious girl appears in the painting, and the artist finds themselves trapped in a pocket dimension with her in total control, and has to be careful not to upset her… or else.
Gameplay is handled in two ways. The first is exploration, searching the strange dimension for items and clues, most of which are added to a sketchbook. The second is puzzle-solving, using those sketches and a color wheel to paint various things to appease the girl (or anger her, just to see how she'll kill you with them).
Death Palette contains examples of:
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: The girl's head can tilt in unnatural ways. It usually heralds when she's about to kill you. It's because her model had her neck (and everything else) snapped when she died.
- Apocalyptic Log: Each day, the artist receives texts from the previous owners of the painting, which provides them with hints on what to draw and information about the painting's backstory. The original painter finds a note from the previous artists who attempted to draw the model about how to handle her temper.
- An Arm and a Leg: If you guess the wrong item during the second part of Day 4's Painting session while the correct item is a crown, the girl tears the artist's arms off.
- Art Imitates Life: The girl's behavior is her imitating how her model treated the original painter.
- Assimilation Backfire: Not all of the painting's victims are benign. On Day 6 when the girl's painting is finished with a pretty earring and the artist is allowed to leave... suddenly the delusional old man takes over the painting, rips the earring off, and forces the artist to "finish" the painting to the point they knock themselves out, ranting that the twisted and broken girl slathered with random colors (representing the model's twisted and broken body) is a masterpiece. The girl recovers on Day 7 after you give the earring back, albeit now pitch black from all the mixed colors.
- Bilingual Bonus: The Painting sessions have titles in both English and French. In addition, the French name is never a direct translation of the English title (for example, "Girl Holding An XXX" is "translated" into "Fille avec cage à oiseaux"note , with the translation providing an additional hint to the puzzle's solution.
- Cast from Hit Points: In the pocket dimension, "putting your soul into your work" is taken bit too literally, and the artist dies if they use too much paint.
- Crime Reconstruction: The framing device for death scenes is a crime scene investigator describing the Chalk Outline of your corpse. They're quite baffled by some of them.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: You can retry immediately after you die. There's no consequences.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: As the days go on, the girl's demeanor towards the artist changes. She'll still be quick to murder them, but she'll speak more kindly and be less picky about what the artist draws. The original painter and the model go through a similar arc, which ends more tragically as the model jumps out the window in an attempt to save the painter's drawings.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Nearly everything in the game is black and white, with colors saved for your drawings and the girl.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The girl operates on this trope. Your task is to draw whatever the girl wants you to draw and if you fail to meet her demands or make even the smallest mistake, she'll horribly kill you in the most gruesome and ironic way she can.
- Eldritch Location: The pocket dimension. Objects appear and disappear without reason, the artist travels between rooms via doors not connected to anything that move all over the place, and the girl has Reality Warper level control over the area and everything inside it, which she will use to kill the artist if they fail to meet her demands. It also looks like the rooms in the manor the model used to live in.
- Exact Words: Used for one puzzle while painting The Girl With The Blue Flower?. The girl asks the artist to place an earring on her right ear while turned so her left side is facing them.
- Eye Scream: The girl tears out the artist's eyes if you sit idle during a Painting session.
- Fission Mailed: The end of Day 4 sees the artist slowly dying from exhaustion after being unable to keep up with the girl's guessing game. They notice a peculiar shadow on the ground which show them some of the memoirs of the artist who created the cursed painting, but it seems like the present artist is doomed and the player would need to replay the game to use this information to possibly find a separate, better ending. Nope, the artist is just brought back to Day 1 again.
- Foreshadowing: In some death scenes, the girl's neck and limbs twist in unnatural ways as she kills the artist. Just like the model's corpse after she fell out the window.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Downplayed. After his death at the end of Day 4, the artist finds themselves back at the first day, much to their and the girl's surprise. The artist manages to make it to Day 7, which brings them back to before their friend brings them the cursed painting, which has now changed into the mostly white painting it became at the end of Day 7.
- Ghostly Goals: Averted. While the girl could've been the spirit of the model wreaking havoc, she's "just" a painting mimicking the model's behavior, and doesn't consider herself human or even the same person.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Death scenes are not directly shown, but represented by a Chalk Outline of the aftermath. This is probably for the best given that the girl is a Reality Warper, which can result in deaths that are especially gruesome, plain bizarre, or both.
- Heroic Mime: Lampshaded by the girl. We can see the artist's thoughts, but he never speaks, even to his friend. The girl even calls the artist her silent painter.
- History Repeats: The original painter's struggles trying to handle the model mirror the artist's struggles in the present. The same warning when arriving in her home, the same type of note warning the painters about the model's temper. The girl also claims the sister and her model died the same way because of the sister's "curse"… before immediately revealing she was just screwing around; they did both die by falling out the window, but for slightly different reasons.
- Identical Stranger: The man who hired the original painter adopted the model because she looked identical to his deceased sister, essentially trying to replace her. He was extremely strict with the model about her behavior, wanting her to be an exact replica of his lost sibling.
- Karmic Death: The girl loves to invoke irony when she kills the artist. Get her scratched by a cat? The artist gets mauled. Give her a unpeeled apple? The artist gets skinned. Give her an empty birdcage? The artist gets stuffed inside one.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: If you choose a different color for the earring in "Ebony Painting" than the one you gave it in "The Girl With The Blue Flower?", then you get a bad ending where the artist wakes up in his workshop without any memories of the last several days.
- Living Drawing: The painting of the girl.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: After the model fell out the window, the original painter and the old man's servants can't do anything but bring her up to her room. The old man comes along, reminisces about his sister... and then proceeds to casually drag the broken, barely-alive model out of the bed and demand the painter get to work on her portrait.
- Nameless Narrative: The previous owners of the cursed painting and the maid are only referred to by their job titles, and everyone else goes completely unnamed.
- Non-Standard Game Over: Each of The Many Deaths of You are followed by an artistic rendition of the artist's corpse and a short snippet of the news report of their death.
- Rainbow Speak: The text of a single character is colored red. That character is the old man who took in (and groomed) the model and hired the original painter.
- Replacement Goldfish: The model is this to the old man, who forced her to essentially replace his deceased sister.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: A couple deaths have the artist try to run, only for the girl to pull them back to her before finishing them off.
- Spoiled Brat: The girl is extremely strict, and the slightest mistakes can lead to the artist's demise. After all, that's what her model was like.
- Spooky Painting: Aside from the obvious, the painting of the girl was done with her model being horribly broken and mangled after she fell from the manor window. The painting taking on its current form is ironically less disturbing than the still image of a literal corpse that the piece originally was.
- The Many Deaths of You: The girl is extremely picky about what she wants the artist to draw, and she has unique ways of killing them for nearly every way it can be screwed up.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You have the option of screwing with the girl in various ways, giving her poisoned food or putting things in ridiculous places, and considering how she acts, you will be tempted to do it. She'll usually return the favor, though. Fatally.
- Weakened by the Light: The girl claims to be pained by bright light. It's a habit she picked up from her model, who isn't weakened by the light, but just didn't want to let artists clearly draw her, afraid the old man would toss her aside once he had another replacement for his sister. Truth in Television, as prolonged light can damage a painting depending on its materials; paper canvases or watercolors are especially susceptible to overexposure.
