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Games

Make Your Own Pearler Without Spilling 4 Million Beads Everywhere

Even if it’s a little ugly, it’ll still end up on the fridge because YOU made it, and that’s what matters.

Bead art is a tedious, messy prospect—one wrong move and not only have you lost hours spent carefully selecting and placing beads, but now there are also several hundred thousand beads scattered to the far reaches of creation. You will never recover all of the beads. This is your life now, in bead hell, and you live here.

Weeks pass, and eventually you are more bead than person, wondering if perhaps you were ever real. Perhaps the memories of your former life are false; the delirious byproduct of your time among the flesh people. Melted plastic figures beckon to you in the dark, calling you home. Reaching out to them, you step on a bead. It hurts. How?

Or, instead, you can play Pete Ellison's Bead Art Studio Pro, which is a cute little flash game (which means, heads up, you have to enable flash in your browser!) about arranging beads on a 12x12 grid, in complete safety. Players select an infinite amount of beads from the 12 available colors, and once finished with their design, slightly ruin it by ironing it all together. I made the frog above, for reference, and while he is a little wonky in spots, I love him as my own.

There's a save function for snapping a fresh .PNG after your bead-self has been conceived in fire, but I couldn't get it to work in Chrome on OSX. It was perhaps foolish to believe that anyone, developer or otherwise, could instill the essence of bead in a simple image. A gaunt visage at best, and truly, perhaps for the best. Bead Art Studio Pro is available for free and runs in-browser, over on itch.io. Ellison also runs a charming shop, where he sells enamel pins, t-shirts and iMessage/LINE sticker packs based on his kawaii little characters.

Have thoughts? Swing by Waypoints forums to share them!