Drawn Story – Alpha Demo

Drawn Story is a nifty, little puzzle-adventure game where you must solve point-&-click-style puzzles by drawing objects for your hapless stickman friend to use.

Drawn Story has a lot in common with Drawn To Life, the action-adventure platformer originally released in late 2007 for the Nintendo DS. In both games, you must draw objects to complete puzzles and overcome new obstacles, though due to a difference in platforms, Drawn Story’s sketching controls substitute out the DS stylus for a mouse. While Drawn Story does an excellent job of mapping your mouse movements, it is more than a little deficient when it comes to recognizing the objects you’ve drawn. For example, the second puzzle of the game requires drawing an oar for your boat, but unless you draw the exact oar the game is programmed to recognize, your drawing will be mislabelled and created as another object entirely. Our first attempt at the puzzle saw a screen half-full of useless “sabres” and “saws” before we finally managed to draw the oar the game wanted. In this way, Drawn Story is far from complete.

Puzzles are also kept very basic in the demo, presumably to help counteract the game’s small database of recognizable objects. It would be interesting to see future iterations of the game feature a stronger narrative, as outside of experimenting with the drawing mechanic, there is very little motivating the player to continue.

Still, despite these various issues, the game is charming in its own way. Most impressively, there are multiple methods for solving puzzles (provided you can get the game to recognize your sketches). With another year or two of development and some art asset updates, Drawn Story could be a solid addition to any art-minded gamer’s library.

Note: Never try to draw an upside down lightbulb. Just trust us on this.

Download The Drawn Story Alpha Demo Here (Win, Mac & Linux)