At first glance, Criminal Impulses looks like it might pass for a gritty cyber-noir thriller. A neon-lit alley. A lone figure in a tactical stance. Bold title font screaming “sci-fi action incoming.” But the moment your eyes adjust to the digital fog, you realize you’re not looking at a cohesive cover — you’re looking at a purple crime scene, and the killer is Photoshop.
Let’s examine the setup. We’ve got a moody, futuristic cityscape bathed in the now-obligatory magenta-cyan color scheme. So far, so synthwave. But look closer — none of the elements are actually from the same universe.
Our central figure — presumably Janik Brynn himself — is cut and pasted into the scene like a confused NPC who wandered in from a different video game. The lighting on his shoulders suggests a strong front-facing light source, yet the entire alley behind him is glowing like a nightclub fire alarm went off. Front-lit? Back-lit? Side-lit? Who knows! He’s lit like a conspiracy theory.
Then there’s the car, hovering behind him like a sentient bumper vehicle. It doesn’t cast realistic reflections, its scale is suspicious, and its tires might as well be photoshopped air. The ground should reflect it. Instead, the pavement reflects an entirely different cityscape — one that appears nowhere above. It’s a puddle of lies.
Speaking of the ground, that slick, blue-toned street looks great until you realize the reflections on it belong to a parallel dimension. The buildings above and the lights below have zero correspondence. It’s like someone dragged in a stock “wet cyber street” and hoped the neon haze would distract you from the architectural betrayal.
Let’s not ignore the skyline, which just… stops. Somewhere above the stoplights and power lines, the city abruptly gives up, dissolving into a blank purple nothing. Apparently, this dystopian metropolis was so over budget they couldn’t afford a skyline past six stories.
And yes, the color filter. A desperate purple wash slapped over everything to unify this visual hostage situation. It’s not stylization — it’s concealment. The universal sign that a designer knew none of the elements matched, shrugged, and said, “What if we made it… pink-ish?”
To its credit, the title font is clean and genre-appropriate, but it’s dressing up for a party the rest of the design didn’t show up to. “JANIK BRYNN CHRONICLES” tries to sell you a serious sci-fi saga, but the rest of the cover sells you Blade Runner fanfiction written in MS Paint.
In the end, Criminal Impulses is what happens when you throw a trench coat, a neon alley, a wet street texture, and a purple fog filter into a blender and call it design. It’s trying to be hard-boiled cyberpunk, but lands somewhere between sci-fi screensaver and Photoshop’s most wanted.