I’ve just finished
playing Drawn: The Painted
Tower and will admit that it was not quite the experience
I was expecting. I enjoy casual puzzle games now and then as light
entertainment. However, the flood of Hidden Object Games (HOGs) that
have been flooding the casual market had blunted their appeal for
me. Many of them simply feel like puzzle games and to me personally,
scanning your screen for listed objects becomes old very quickly.

A
few of these games, however, have evolved to puzzles built around
a real story, such as the Agatha Christie Casual games, and the Women’s
Murder Club games. Some also have started to build in
a diversity of puzzles, such as Samantha
Swift and Return to Ravenhearst –
the latter incidentally a game which in my opinion was a great improvement
on its predecessor.

Then you have puzzle games
which attempt to break away from the HOG mold, such as Pahelika
Secret Legends and the Dream
Chronicles series, the latter of which I personally find
quite pleasing as pure puzzle games.

I had heard that Drawn:The
Painted Tower was such a game as the latter mentioned ones,
but still – the game had been released by a publisher that specializes
mainly in HOG and casual games.

So it was with some reservations
that I approached this game. I had to a great extent felt attracted
to its lovely-looking screenshots, but I was not quite sure what to
expect in the gameplay department. I felt rather sceptical, and didn’t
expect much in the sense of true entertainment.

When I started up the game,
contrary to my expectations, I was rather impressed. The game starts
off with an intro that immediately draws you in with its poetically
delivered narration, a moving orchestral musical rendition, and a
graphical presentation that adds to the dark subtle drama and pathos
of the setting.

In a world shrouded
in darkness
In a town bleak and trampled
A small girl stands atop a tall tower.

A beacon of hope imprisoned
by shadows
She calls out for help, but her voice is stolen by the wind,
…and her tears, like dreams, are lost in the night.

I felt swept along.

I
was still a bit prejudiced and sceptical, though. When this lovely
intro ended, and the player was expected to go through motions that
were rather simple and obvious, I thought to myself: “Well, then!
Just as I had expected… This is just going to be another one
of those flat, boring casual games, albeit hopefully not yet another
of the already abundant flood of HOGs.”

Boy, was I wrong! Let me
not get ahead of myself though. This game is not an easy game to classify.

…so what does it ‘feel’
like?

Drawn
is a first person point-and click game, and although it does work
on the “slideshow” basis, clever use of sound and animation
makes it come alive, making it feel less of a slideshow than many
similar games I have played that use the same mechanic.

A “feel”
of three-dimensionality as far as the areas are concerned, is quite
cleverly simulated, firstly by constantly having the player move into
new areas that are situated at different elevations (Up to the top
of the tree house, then down into the tree’s innards, up to
the top of a magic tower, then down into its interior again). In addition,
by using clever animations, the player is made to feel as if he actually
enters the magical paintings that feature in the story.

A feature that I personally
enjoyed, is the absolute freedom that the player has to move back
to already-visited environments. Gone is the “screen after screen”
feeling present in many casual games. The story progression is very
linear, but the freedom of movement afforded to the player had the
result that I never felt restricted or hedged in while playing the
game.

Puzzles, puzzles – puzzled?

There
is a very nice variety of puzzle types, in fact, probably a wider
variety than I’ve seen in many “true-blue” Adventure
Games. A staple of the game is your usual Adventure Game style inventory
puzzle. Many of these are nicely complicated by the fact that you
often have to go and search for the necessary item in areas other
than the obvious immediate surroundings.

Add a few easy slider and
jigsaw puzzles, a symbol re-arranging puzzle if not quite a cryptogram
puzzle, and a nice little mechanical puzzle or two.

Admittedly, most of the
puzzles won’t exactly land you in the recovery ward for overtaxed
cerebrums – most of them are pretty easy to figure out, but
let me warn you… like in any good Adventure Game, there are
one or two that might just – yes, just possibly might, have you break
into a bit of a sweat.

The nice
part is, though, that most of the puzzles make sense! Now isn’t
that a refreshing thing for an adventure game? If there is anything
that really holds this game back from being a true-blue, classic adventure
game, it is that most of the puzzles are actually contextual and rely
on logic rather than weirdness to befuddle you…

In fact,
every single one of the inventory puzzles made sense to me. Almost
all of the logic puzzles did as well, with a single small exception
– in which I had to use the “try everything with everything
else” approach. But hey, maybe the solution does somehow make
sense and I’m just too dense to see the correlation? You never
know.

What really impressed me
though, is that this game, has not a single “hidden objects”
screen. (…or if it had, I didn’t notice.)

The user interface (…an Adventure Game?
A puzzle game?…or not?)

The
main elements of the interface are visible at all times, but beautifully
rendered and very user-friendly. In the bottom right-hand corner,
just above your tag to return to the main menu, you will find a “Help”
menu, explaining the different little icons that the contextual cursor
may change into, and other similar things like the movement arrows.
I really only had a look at that because I was writing a review and
not because I would have needed it, since the gameplay is so intuitive.

As
far as gameplay goes –for me it was effortless, save for one
small gripe – I must mention this, because it did irritate me.
Often when one looked at a document or similar object in close-up,
it was rather difficult to exit the object again, and with a few of
them I had to click a few times here, there and everywhere to try
and exit the close-up again. This is my one, single gripe though,
and one that I hope the developers of this otherwise excellently produced
game would take note of.

Now
for the rest of the interface; and here is where the game’s
“causal” roots show a little. You get quite a nicely done
“hints” system, in the form of the old guardian of Iris,
the girl you are looking for. Your hand is reasonably subtly held
by subject headings that appear on a tiny blackboard in the bottom
left-hand corner, and I say “subtle” because this is not
a situation of the game telling you “in-your-face” where
to go and what to do, but just a subject indicator that describes
the essence of the problem at hand, that needs to be focussed on.
Example of subject indicator: “Sun and rain.”

However,
if you do then find you have a little problem with figuring out what
to do with “Sun and rain” you can click on the tiny portrait
of Iris’s guardian, to give you a succession of increasingly
more to-the-point hints. Theoretically, one can ignore the blackboard,
but I would personally have preferred for it to have been hidden from
view, and only accessed by a click.

The
nice aspect of the hint system is that it really makes finding a walkthrough
for this game rather redundant, especially since the logic puzzles
are also “skippable”. If you’ve fiddled with a logic
puzzle for a number of minutes, a little timer bar above the puzzle
runs down and allows you to “skip” the puzzle if you really
find it to be more challenging than what you had expected to encounter
in a casual little run-through of a game from a publisher that has
a history of releasing casual games.

The puzzles pick up in
complexity and level of difficulty as the game progresses, so do be
patient if you’ve started the game and find the puzzles laughably
easy at first.

….so what is this game about?

In Drawn: The Painted
Tower, there is an interesting premise, and a nice little
back story; a simple fairy tale on the surface, yet with subtle and
interestingly rich tapestry, that is beautifully and cleverly told.

It is a story of a missing
princess that you need to find in a magical tower in order to save
her from an ambitious, avaricious evil that has overtaken her land.
The princess and her family have a very special gift – and this
is what lends such richness to the game: they can make enchanted paintings
that become “real”. Yes indeed, so real, that you can
step into them.

She has left magical paintings
around the tower, and you need to explore them and solve puzzles around
them, in order to make your way towards the princess.

However,
there is less of a meat-and-bones story than there are hints of possibilities.
I get the impression that Drawn: The Painted Tower
is the setting for more to come, especially if one takes the rather
unsatisfying ending into account.

Yes, perhaps the abrupt
ending is not quite as bad as Still
Life or A Vampyre Story’s unresolved
and cliff-hanger endings, but… okay, maybe it does come very
close, and I’d certainly be expecting at least one sequel to
Painted Tower. (In fact, I demand one!)

Drawn: The Painted
Tower’s story is structured similar to that of Myst,
in the sense that you need to unravel a mystery that presents itself
in the present time, by working on clues from the past, and only at
the end of the story do you get to meet the protagonist and the “real”
action takes place.

Without having any idea
of who you are, (the typical AFGNCAAP), or how you came to be in your
current situation, you are drawn into the world of The Painted
Tower, by examining the clues, messages and paintings left
behind by those you seek to save from a sad fate.

In a way this narration
mechanic is enchanting and intriguing, and in fact, I have always
found that this “back-to-front” narrative technique is
one that very successfully draws me in. Overclocked,
for example, as well as Zork
Nemesis used it to great effect.

The style of the game

To
lovers of the old LucasArts classics : Don’t be looking for
any witty, humorous dialogue and razor sharp repartee in The
Painted Tower. In fact, there is not much dialogue at all,
and what there is, is mostly in text, and functional in nature. So
the tone of the game is not humorous, but is wistful and of whimsical
and moody beauty, and as such, it holds together well.

The upside of this is that,
if you are a person who finds juvenile and/or toilet humor something
to avoid in a game, you won’t have that problem here. If you
are one of those people to whom certain voices are terribly irritating,
and/or if you’re really picky about voice acting, well, luckily
you won’t be hearing much that is going to chase you up the
walls.

Music to my ears…

To add to the wistful and
almost “Arty” style with which this enchanting little
fairy tale is approached, is the skilful use of sound editing and
the excellent orchestral musical score, which is at times melancholy,
at times either delicately enchanting or moody, at times just subtle
background filler, but at other times, swells with such passion and
beauty, that it sweeps you along, evoking an emotional response from
the player, that truly enriches the total experience of the game.

The sound special effects,
such as rain or a little rabbit munching a carrot, are also well done,
and not overly obtrusive, yet “there” enough to add realism
to the experience.

A picture is worth a thousand words…

The
rich environments with their varying moods depicted in the Drawn:
The Painted Tower, are truly almost like paintings that you
had stepped into, but these paintings are alive with sound and animation.

You will love the graphics
in this game especially if you like the kind of expressive colours
and moods that were used in A
Vampyre Story, but that is where the similarity to that
game ends.

Despite the stylised art
style which would be suggestive of a cartoon-like style, The
Painted Tower is subtly dramatic and enigmatic and wistful,
with a charming mystique, all quite tastefully presented, with no
aspirations to be a humorous or witty game – just a simple story,
rather unconventionally presented.

The bottom line

…and so, there you
have Drawn: The Painted Tower, a charming game with
an enigmatic setting, a game of haunting beauty that defies easy description
– a game that does not easily fit into the convenient pigeonhole
of either “Adventure” or “Casual.”

This game is in a class
of its own…. – it is poetry.

Though probably too “lite”
to be truly considered a “proper” adventure game, if the
hint system were made harder to access, and if the dialogue and plot
were fleshed out a bit, I suspect that a sequel could well be classified
as full-blown adventure game.

Besides
the artistry of presentation, what sets this game apart for me from
most other casual games is that it comes across as a seamless whole;
the skilful depiction of a single story, in spite of being a loose
collection of puzzles. In evidence here is not just adroit game production,
but an excellent attempt at producing a cohesive story and enchanting
atmosphere. This is a trend that has only recently started with casual
games, and whether you choose to see it as adventure, casual, or hybrid,
in this particular game, it was very well done.

A small warning; this is
a rather short game – most probably in part due to the lack of dialogue,
and possibly also to the relative ease of the puzzles which allows
for a fast flow in the progression of the game; so do not expect to
spend quite the same amount of time on it than you would have on a
full-length adventure game. The game is not very expensive though,
so in my personal opinion, it still remains good value for the price
($6.99) and a delightful experience to boot.

The Painted Tower
has positively changed my opinion of this “crossover”
Casual genre, and I will certainly be looking forward to other hybrids
of this type, with interest. In fact, I fell in love with it, and
I will be anxiously awaiting a sequel.

As a casual game, I cannot
have enough praise for The Painted Tower, and if
it were longer, I would have given it a solid A at least, since it
really delivers in the story, sound, graphics and especially the atmosphere
department. Since the game is rather short, I would downgrade that
to an A-.

As
an Adventure Game, I would subtract marks for the short length, lack
of dialogue and a thin plot that has an unsatisfying, abrupt ending.
Unfortunately, the game might not present quite enough challenge in
the puzzle department for a full-blown adventure game, due to the
assistance given in the game. However, the game obviously has high
production values and a lot of positive qualities, and I would therefore
prefer to withhold grading it as an adventure game, although I would
certainly encourage adventure gamers to try the game out, depending
on what you are looking for in a game.

If what you are looking
for is artistry and sheer beauty in presentation, then this little
gem is for you.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista
• CPU: 1.0 GHz
• RAM: 512 MB
• DirectX: 8.1
• Hard Drive: 643 MB