Licence to Paint, a spy in nine paintings

September 4, 2026

The Walk was the second of three games that came out of one afternoon, all from the same 2022 idea: a public-domain painting is already a finished point-and-click screen, with the characters standing in it. The first was a museum adventure. The second was The Walk. Then I asked for the one I had wanted all along:

wow so amazing! so now we have 3 projects haha... the museum, the continuous walk and then the thing I actually wanted haha... [...] ok so the thing I actually wanted was basically Monkey Island but instead of custom backgrounds use paintings... the theme... maybe we can 007 style something, since that will easily take you around the world.

Twenty-five minutes later it was live. All three were built on 3 September; this one carries the 4th because the 3rd already belongs to The Walk.

Title screen: Licence to Paint, a spy adventure staged inside paintings that belong to everyone, over Monet's Houses of Parliament at sunset. Two buttons, Begin guided and Begin classic, and the painting's credit along the bottom — The title is Monet's *Houses of Parliament, Sunset* (1903). The two ways to start came later; more on that below.

Sets, not subjects

In the museum game you climb into The Milkmaid and talk to the milkmaid. Here the paintings are only where things happen. London, 1889: cities are losing their colour, Covent Garden has gone grey overnight, and Agent Seven of the Department of Improbable Affairs is after Baron Grau, who is packing all of it into a Chromatic Engine. His defence, when she finds him: I am giving the world good taste: silver, grey, and black, like a fine etching.

The Department is Wright of Derby's Air Pump. Caillebotte's rainy street hides the informant, Lautrec's Moulin Rouge has the duel, Canaletto's Piazza San Marco has the forger, Gérôme's carpet merchant sells ultramarine, Hiroshige's Edo has gone grey, Piranesi's Round Tower is the fortress, and Renoir's dance at the Moulin de la Galette is the party at the end. Between them is Quill's map, drawn in code and captioned mostly accurate.

Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, candlelit. Agent Seven in a navy coat and red scarf stands at the left, life-size next to the painted figures. Name tags: the Director, Quill, the gentleman with the watch, the two girls, the boy at the window; arrows to the door to the river and the map. A gold ring pulses on the pump valve. Next: Quill will not talk while the bird is dying. Use the pump valve, the brass tap above the glass. Six verb buttons below — The Department is *An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump* (1768). Quill, in the red gown, hands out the gadgets, but not while the bird is dying. This is guided mode: everyone labelled, the next step spelled out.

Monkey Island rules

It plays like the LucasArts games: six verbs under the picture, a sentence line that says what a click will do (Use the grey glove with Signor Copia), pockets with drawn icons, right click to look. Agent Seven is drawn in code, not painted, and like the walker in The Walk she is scaled to the people around her. At the front of the Air Pump she is drawn at 1.8, at the front of Canaletto's piazza at 0.26: the same woman, seven times smaller.

The insult sword fight is here too, without the swords. Madame Vermilion, the green face at the right edge of Lautrec's painting, has not lost at Repartee since 1885, and that was a bishop. She insults you, you answer, the room decides, first to three. The right answers come from the regulars at the other tables; lose and you buy champagne for the whole table.

Run home, little agent. London is grey, and so are you.
London is grey because somebody is stealing it. I came to see who dresses so badly they need the whole world to match.

Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge, with Agent Seven standing in front of the tables and the green-lit face of Madame Vermilion at the right edge. Across the bottom, six possible answers, among them: Then you have a good eye for china and a poor one for spies. A lamppost at least knows where the light is. I refuse to answer that. Well... you are one too — *At the Moulin Rouge* (1892–95). Six answers on offer, one of them fits the insult she has just made. Two of them never fit anything.

Edo goes grey

Hiroshige's theatre street is the one set that changes. The Baron has hung one of his lanterns among the theatre's and it has drawn the colour out of the whole print. All twenty lanterns look grey; the Chromatic Monocle shows which one is a hole in the light, packed full of stolen colour, humming. Unhook it and the blue comes back over about a second and a half.

Two views of Hiroshige's Night View of Saruwaka-machi side by side, Agent Seven in the crowd in both. On the left everything is grey, even the moon. On the right the sky is deep blue, the banners blue and the paper warm again — *Night View of Saruwaka-machi* (1856), before and after. The game draws a greyed copy of the print and fades the original back in over it.

Not a point-and-click guy

About two hours later I played it:

dont know how to get out of the map... I love the setting the writing and everything... only thing is I am not much of a point and click guy so I need more guidance / clearer guidelines or whatever... imagine a super easy mode for the game

Earlier that afternoon I had said the same about the museum game: I am usually a bit bored by point and click so perhaps we can increase the pace. But the map was not me. It was a bug, and it was in every door: a click on an exit or a pin walked you up to it and stopped there. The agent's own playthrough called the exits directly in code, so it went through every door a player could not.

Six minutes later both were in: the doors worked, and the title had a second way to start. Begin · guided always shows a Next: line with the exact step in plain words, puts a gold ring on the thing to click, and tags every person, thing and exit. Begin · classic hides all of it; H shows the same hint for a few seconds.

The museum one

The first of the three is The Wanderer's Day Off. You are Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and you want one walk in sunshine. The Night Guard counts the paintings at midnight, so first you need a stand-in on your rock. The rowers under Hokusai's wave give you a fish, the waiter at Van Gogh's café takes it for a coffee, the Milkmaid trades her jug for the coffee, cold milk wakes a Bruegel harvester off his sheaf, and straw, jug, coat and stick make a double. It ends in the 2022 painting, with the 2022 line.

My first reaction was to the words:

I absolutely love everything except the usual AI language... this is a recurring theme. I need you to write in an epic way but also a videogame way which means for adults and children alike... so the writing is the main thing now. also a main quest. what am I supposed to do? why am I here?

After the rewrite, about the rooms: the paintings where something happens like the boat with fish or the cafe... that's just peak... the way he sits down...

Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night, yellow awning and starry sky. The Wanderer, a dark figure, sits on one of the terrace chairs at a small round table. His line: I sit. The chair holds. I have not sat down in two hundred years, and my knees are very grateful. A quest line at the top left: Build a stand-in on the rock, 0 of 4 — *Café Terrace at Night* (1888). The waiter will not serve you from the street, so you sit down.

paintings: nine, from 1749 to 1903, out of seven collections, each credited as you enter and again at the end
verbs: six: walk to, look at, talk to, pick up, use, give
code: 1,241 lines of JavaScript in three files, plain canvas, no engine
weight: 2.4 MB, nearly all of it the paintings
built: 3 September: 25 minutes from the ask to the first live version, the door fix and guided mode two hours after that
the museum one: six paintings, about 20 minutes

Licence to Paintmouse and a wide screen, guided or classic The Wanderer's Day Offthe museum one The Walkthe second of the three

Still rough

Neither game has any sound. Both are made for a mouse and a wide screen. The longest retort runs into the right edge of the frame, as in the screenshot above. The only complete playthrough on record is the headless one the agent wrote; my own run stopped at the broken map. The screenshots are real frames of the live games, but taken by opening each room directly with the game's own room parameter rather than by playing there, so the pockets and the mission line show a state set up for the picture, not a save.