I missed out on Draw Me A Pixel’s first game, ‘There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension’, but Alex absolutely loved the game and lauded it for its creative genre-spanning gameplay and clever writing. After I’ve played the opening fifteen minutes of their newly announced direct follow-up Crushed in Time, though, I had to admit that I’m enticed to go back and see that original game for myself. Crushed in Time is set up as an entirely standalone game following Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they get into a time-travelling adventure that might have more to say about game development than you might expect. What sets it apart, however, is its unique gameplay that tries to bring a fresh twist to the point and click adventure genre.

The opening of the game is pretty straightforward from a narrative point of view. Dr. Watson is locked out of Holmes’ apartment and needs to wake the detective up in order to hand over a letter to him. This might all sound pretty simple, but it is a great showcase for the gameplay. Unlike other point and click games, this one is controlled by physically dragging around the environment. There’s no simple clicking, even on arrows that allow you to move to different locations. Using the mouse, you hold the button and drag the object you want to interact with and let go. The physics impact the movement of the environment and are the method to solving the puzzles. In order to ring the phone that will wake up Sherlock, you first need to open a drawer that’s locked. By dragging the doorknob from the door and flinging it through the room into the drawer, you can open it up and get access to new items. When later on a letter got stuck to the ceiling, I had to drag the chair around to create a step for Holmes to reach the ceiling.

It’s pretty hard to describe this gameplay on paper, but in practice it becomes second nature incredibly quick, especially if you’ve played games on a tablet or touchscreen before. This gameplay mechanic is especially well suited for the gorgeous art style and design of the game. The rooms and characters have this angular look, but that allows them really to stand apart from the backgrounds. They are accompanied by some wonderful animations that feel fluid and smooth, yet retain their cartoony feel and look. It works wonders when you start dragging at the mustache of Holmes or give Watson a bit of a nudge to reach for an object. A lot of things in the environment react to your input, making you really feel in control as the player.

My biggest concern is that this also made the demo a lot tougher than I was expecting. I think I was stumbling around for a good five minutes trying to get the aforementioned letter down from the ceiling. Because everything ‘feels’ interactable, it’s much harder to draw your attention to specific solutions or steps when solving a puzzle like this. I rarely feel embarrassed when playing demo’s next to the developers, but here I did start to sweat a little bit as I couldn’t figure out how to get a jar of honey into Sherlock’s room in order to help stick the letter to the ceiling. That may sound weird, but in the logic of the game it did kind of make sense. While it’s good that I was thrown into the deep end right from the start, I do think that a little bit of signposting would be helpful for players that find puzzle games like these a bit more complicated. It’s natural with a gameplay system that allows for near infinite interaction, but the small hints that Watson and Holmes dropped really weren’t enough for me to realize there was a hidden object in the room to solve my puzzle.

Regardless, I was incredibly charmed by Crushed in Time. The writing, art-style, voice performances and gameplay feel perfectly woven together and absolutely made me interested in playing more. The game should release sometime for PC next year, and with those mouse controls it would absolutely be a shame if it didn’t make an appearance on Switch 2 sometime later. For sleuths and puzzle-afficionados alike, this is one to keep an eye out for.