I don’t expect much out of Big Fish Games’ library: Sally runs every business under the sun, Farm Frenzy gets repetitive once you purchase the bakery, and every puzzle game is a repetitive point-and-click affair.
Except Drawn: Dark Flight.
A sequel to Drawn: The Painted Tower, Dark Flight is a richly rendered 2D video game that takes place in a land overrun by shadows. Your quest is to find the exiled princess Iris and help her banish the shadows once and for all. You do that by solving puzzles, locating clues, and completing drawings of useful items. Should you need a hint, the family’s faithful servant provides you two for each puzzle. You can even skip as many puzzles as you like should they make you pull your hair out. All of this makes the game sound simple. It isn’t.
The puzzles are seldom obvious. They aren’t even the same basic type throughout the game. Each puzzle has its own rules and its own unique solution. The beginning ones were relatively straightforward (pick up the stray rope in the room, use it to climb through the hole in the ceiling), and some were more difficult to figure out than others (why am I clicking the librarian’s eye?!), but I found there was a learning curve for each.
The difficulty varied from puzzle to puzzle as well. The challenges increased in difficulty as you got further into the game, but certain types of puzzles were oddly more difficult than others in the same section of the game. Some puzzles were either too obtuse (how am I supposed to mix all these colors in this lady’s face?) or time-consuming (a cello collage only Picasso could figure out) for me to bother with. I skipped them, and while I missed out on the achievement points for those puzzles I am still grateful that I retained my sanity.
For all the other puzzles I got stuck on – meaning, the ones I actually completed – I made heavy use of the hint system. The more I clicked on it the clearer the instructions got, telling me exactly what to do to solve certain puzzles depending on how badly I was failing at them. I appreciated that greatly.
The controls were easy and accessible point-and-click. The soundtrack was a diverse and immensely enjoyable small-scale fantasy film score. The artwork was stunning: I felt like I was playing in an art gallery – dark fantasy scenes, Thomas Kinkaide scenes, A Robinson Crusoe-style shipwreck, paper cutouts, marionettes, collage work. The game was so visually rich I couldn’t help but be sucked into the story.
Sadly, despite all those dastardly puzzles, I got through the game in a little over three hours. That (and the anti-climactic ending) made me sad. I so thoroughly enjoyed being part of that world I wanted to spend more time there. Good thing for me the game’s part of a series. Bad thing for me that there’s no news about a sequel just yet. Stay tuned.
If all of this sounds like The Painted Tower, it is; Dark Flight simply takes us out of the tower and into the surrounding town. Kudos, Team Drawn: Dark Flight has made me a convert.
Drawn: Dark Flight is available as a Collector’s Edition at Big Fish Games for $19.99. There’s an extra 2 hours of content in there, with forums and achievements as well as concept art and downloadable content, so it’s worth checking out.
News and Culture Editor Laurie Vazquez really misses when all games were flat. Sure, she’s worked in television and veered off into film and television writing, but when she’s not whacking out scripts for contests (or, more likely, when she should be whacking them out) she fires up her beloved flat games. Take away her Nintendo, and she is a sad, sad girl. Just don’t take away her Futurama or her viola: that makes her mad.
