Draw Me A Pixel is doing something bold for their second release. After the decidedly un-game-like There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, the studio has decided to actually make a game this time round. It’s just a damned shame that it’s all gone a bit wrong for release, the review bombing has rolled in, and now Sherlock and Watson are off to solve the mysterious case of the game-breaking missing NPC.
If you were to be strict about genre definitions, this would have to be called a point & click adventure, but that really isn’t the half of it. It’s much more of a…. grab and slap? Pull and stretch? Slap and tickle? Probably not the last one. What I mean to say is that instead of the traditional style where you point and things and click on them to move your character over and interact or utter some witty barbs, your cursor is actually the one doing the interacting directly. And that interaction comes in the form of pulling on the elastic scenery and letting loose.
It’s basically the opening screen of Mario 64, shoved into a blender with a point & click game – I cheekily asked if they were fans of this one specific thing and Fred Malavasi, associate producer and comms manager, replied “As a child, I spent hours [playing with] Mario’s face. So yeah, definitely!” – and it manifests in some truly wonderful ways through the opening scene.
It’s a regular day on Baker Street when a repeated pounding on the front door summons Watson to answer, but as he opens it, the presumed postman grabs him for a hug and hands him a letter. Weird, but OK. Time to deliver that to Holmes, but Watson is himself now stuck pounding on the locked door to Sherlock’s apartment.
Now it’s over to you to figure out how to resolve this issue. Mousing around the screen, you can click and grab any part of it, pull it and release for a little bit of enjoyable wobble, but you’re really searching for the white dots to actually interact with. This won’t necessarily be the direct solution, of course, but rather provides the framework of the puzzle you need to complete.
You see, the door knob won’t open the door, and instead plings down onto the floor, letting you then grab it again, pull and launch it in an arc to get across the room and slot into the hole on a drawer, which in turn will release a telephone cord for you to plug in and trigger a call to wake Holmes up. There’s all the hallmarks of a point & click puzzle here, but how you’re finding and giving the solution is just so thoroughly different.
That persists as you go through the successive puzzles in this introduction as things start to get even more unusual. You see, that letter Watson holds suddenly defies gravity and flips up to the ceiling. How do you get it down? Well, it’s obviously some kind of combination of honey, dumb waiter and portraits of the queen, but once again, you’re grabbing things, flicking them around and seeing what works. Holmes, the rather stubborn ass, just considers all of these bizarre occurrences to be a part of his own brilliance, completely oblivious to your unknowable force and inputs.
Getting stuck is a natural part of the genre, as obscure solutions to strange situations stump you and hold up your progress. Fred confirms that “We have two types of hints. The first one is you just have to look around and maybe listen to what characters are saying. But the second one, we are definitely going to have a real hints system. I can’t say exactly what right now, but there will be a hints system like in every point & click game.”
There’s three different styles of action that Draw Me A Pixel use through this into: grabbing to stretch and release, grabbing to release and eject, and grabbing and then spinning something round. I’ve no doubt that there’s more than these three, and there’s a bunch of snippets found within the teaser trailer.
But what was that about a buggy, review-bombed game release? Well, hopefully the actual game won’t have a troubled launch, but the narrative is that the in-game Draw Me A Pixel has released this buggy mess. As they set off from Baker Street in the Sherlock-o-motive (it’s a car), Holmes and Watson don’t realise that they’re going to be on a time-travelling adventure, of sorts, that delves back through and explores their game in different iterations. Expect to see prototypes, alpha versions and lots of other quirky stuff, likely leaning back into some of the shenanigans that were seen in There Is No Game.
Crushed In Time looks like a truly unique and exciting riff on the point & click adventure, with its truly inventive grabbing and elastic mechanics. If you like the genre and have a barmy sense of humour, this should absolutely be on your watch list for 2026.
