Never Happened

Never Happened stars Vince Lang, a painter who has spent ten years making art that nobody stopped to look at. He now moves fine art for a living, and his company has one rule: never leave a scratch. When a painting is damaged, Vince must cover up the damage before the inspector finds it.

Restore the paintings

Each restoration gives you 180 seconds to paint over a tear. The time limit is deliberately tight, though Solo Practice lets you set the clock to unlimited. There is no undo, and the task is to cover the damage with the limited time and tools available, not to make a tidy painting. If you need help, you can ask a colleague for color mixing or an undercoat.

You mix colors yourself from five pigments on a palette, matching what remains of the original by sight. There is no eyedropper; the challenge is judging color rather than painting skill.

Inspect your work

The game machine-scores each restoration against the original and gives you a match rate as a percentage. A heatmap shows where your work differs. After inspection, you can compare the original, the painting just after the accident and your restoration side by side.

You can publish finished restorations to “Everyone’s Works,” where other players’ pieces are displayed. You can replay their brushwork from the first stroke and attempt the same painting with the same tear. You can also export an image or video of your work.

Paintings and story

The game includes more than 100 works from art history, each represented by a high-resolution scan of the genuine public-domain original. Story mode follows Vince’s work as a fine-art courier across ten chapters.

Game modes

Runs take three minutes, and six modes offer different ways to restore paintings:

• Story: follow the tale of a fine-art courier across ten chapters.
• Endless: restore paintings one after another until game over, choosing each next painting from a branching map.
• Daily: take on the same subject as everyone else that day, compete with other players and climb the leagues.
• Events: play featured exhibitions for a limited time, with subjects available only while each event is open.
• Versus: create an online room for up to four players, all restoring the same painting at the same time.
• Solo Practice: choose the painting, difficulty and tear location, and set the clock to unlimited if you wish.

Every restoration receives a match-rate score. Depending on the mode and your settings, scores can appear on a worldwide ranking.