By Jim Rossignol on September 5th, 2009 at 12:06 pm.
Big Fish Games have just released a rather charming adventure game called Drawn: The Painted Tower. The story-book illustration art style is perfect for the concept, which involves various magical paintings which must be fixed, navigated, and interacted-with as you negotiate your way up the tower to save the last person who can paint such things: a young girl. Annoyingly, the demo comes wrapped up in Big Fish Games game launcher, but nevertheless the hour-limited taster is definitely enough to get a sense of whether or not you like it, which I rather do. It has some of the frustrations of “er wot” that come with point-and-click adventures, but it’s not been too obtuse with its puzzles so far.
See, John, I can totally write about adventure games!
Jihm Walkergnol?
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Just on principle, I’d never try a demo of a game that insisted I installed a client that would no doubt want to run on startup evermore and try all sorts of other promotional tricks.
When they offer you a free taster of coffee outside starbucks, you don’t agree to have a starbucks sales rep move into your spare room before you taste it.
Bah :D
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Agreed.
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That was pretty enjoyable. It’s not difficult by any stretch, but I’ve had a decent couple of hours with it and enjoyed the story enough to feel that it was worth paying for.
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The Big Fish launcher doesn’t seem to add anything beyond a desktop icon.
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As far as I can tell, the client only downloads the game. It doesn’t start automatically and doesn’t annoy. I didn’t even have to register, so you can probably enter a fake email address.
The game seems lovely, and I might buy it, but the demo in reality is only 15-20 minutes long. Which is kind of disappointing for a demo with a 1 hour play time limit.
And I can’t really tell how much longer the game will be and if it will ever be challenging and what the challenges will be. So far it was mainly finding things you could click on. It was always clear how to advance once you found the clickable item.
So yeah. If this had a 1 hour demo, that was actually 1 hour long, I might be more interested. So far I can’t tell if I’d like the game.
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Bought this, since it was cheap. Quite liking it so far.
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Rather nice fairy-taley stuff.
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Very impressive for what it is. Enjoyed it tremendously.
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You can use a fake email for the demo and the installer doesn’t seem very different from Steam.
I enjoyed the demo enough to buy the game. Thanks for the heads up.
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BFG client is ok, been member for over a year now… The casual market been quite boring lately, though, I might try that, I have WAAAY too many unused credits…
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@Cliffski – yep. If it doesn’t do anything, then why do they have it?
Suspicious…
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The client doesn’t run on start-up, and seems just to function as a hub to launch any of their games from. Uses next to no resources too.
The game is… growing a little tiresome, and it’s puzzles are stagnating a little. The hints system is great in theory but doesn’t alter based on what you’re doing. So when you’ve done two out of three parts of a puzzle, but are stuck on the last, it insists on giving you hints for the first parts too, and you have to wait for the hint meter to recharge before getting another one.
The game reminds me a lot of Pahelika actually, which was ok.
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Finished earlier. At four hours total play time, felt far too short – but could be because I was enjoying it rather a lot. Tricky one though – really easy to pick apart, and if you’re being deeply analytical, not a lot to praise other than the lovely innocence to it all. But that somehow wins out. Denby’s thumb is raised.
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