You don’t typically put Sherlock Holmes, P.G. Wodehouse, and Wallace and Gromit in the same thought — unless you’re Pascal Cammisotto, writer and director for Draw Me A Pixel’s upcoming time-travel adventure Crushed in Time. Cammisotto tells Polygon he used these as starting points for building on his previous work, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Crushed in Time is a meta story about existing inside a game to tell a story about making a game — and all the mess and stress that entails. It sounds absurd written out like that, but after playing a 45-minute demo of the game, I can’t wait to see more.
The game inside the game is not in a happy state. The story starts moments after the fictional game’s launch, as negative reviews flood in and send the fictional team into a panic. Your job is figuring out how to fix it — deducing what’s wrong, if you will. And who better to deduce something than Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes? In Crushed In Time, the answer is “probably anyone.” This version of Holmes is a bit dingy, and Watson isn’t much better. They bumble around and flummox themselves over the most trivial of daily rituals, like fetching the mail or opening a door. Hence the Wallace and Gromit comparisons, which Cammisotto says are very much intentional. The ridiculous is perfectly normal and reasonable here, and I couldn’t help thinking how at home this version of Holmes would be in one of Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle or Jeeves stories. Yet, as is the case with Wodehouse’s writing, it’s all exquisitely well-balanced. So far, anyway, Crushed in Time has excellent comedic timing and a lightness of touch to the writing, which means jokes never cross into being obnoxious.
Holmes and Watson’s problems are the fictional game’s problems, so your task is helping them fix them. But, as a visitor to the game world, you have to operate on the game’s logic, which means you have no inventory and no means of interacting with things other than poking and pulling at them. It’s a clever little tongue-in-cheek nod to the creative process and a hugely enjoyable bit of physics-based puzzling. Anything is pokeable and pullable. In the first puzzle, you have to wake Holmes from a nap. The phone is the answer, but the cord is trapped in a knobless drawer. So you borrow the door’s handle, angle a lob across the room, and fit it onto the drawer. Then you slap the phone to make it ring, put the knob back — and realize the door is locked. Holmes is blocking the cubby where the key lives. The solution? Tug on his newspaper to annoy him so he moves his head and gives you space to tinker with the cubby to get the key.
It’s deliciously tactile and, once you catch on to how the world’s physics actually work, highly intuitive. The demo’s brevity left me wanting more, so to fill the time between now and Draw Me A Pixel’s promised second demo, I spoke with Cammisotto over email about the process of making such an unusual puzzle adventure.
There’ve been dozens of versions of Holmes and Watson over the decades. What did you want to bring to your versions of these characters?
Our version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson is very different from what we are used to seeing in general. Here, we are dealing with a comedic and parodic version of the famous detective. You could even say that his deductions are among the worst imaginable. And Dr. Watson is hardly any better.
I wanted to create a duo that is both funny and endearing, a bit like Wallace and Gromit in terms of tone and lightness.
They are characters I love putting into inexplicable situations through the very meta aspect of our two games, and writing their reactions is a real treat. The voice actors also had a lot of fun with these two oddballs.
The method of interacting with the environment is so tactile and enjoyable — and also pretty unusual for adventure games. How did it come to be? Did it just spring to life fully formed, or did you go through some trial-and-error before settling on pulling things in the environment?
When the idea of creating an adventure centered around these two characters first emerged, our thinking about the gameplay came down to one question: How would Nintendo’s teams approach the creation of a point-and-click game if their goal was to reach a broader audience?
Point-and-click is a niche market. To many players, it can often feel a bit austere and old-school. We wanted to break away from that rather unsexy framework and find a new, playful, and appealing angle.
The elasticity mechanic came to the table fairly quickly. It is very visual, it also plays with sound, and the interaction itself is very simple. That said, we iterated on the concept for a good year because, as it turns out, it was a real technical challenge.
Stretching pixels, how hard could that be?
Big mistake.
And how challenging was it to build puzzles around?
Transforming a point-and-click game through this elasticity mechanic raised billions of questions. Are we stretching a 2D element? A 3D one? How do we handle the depth of a room? Do we have an inventory or not? What happens if a character walks in front of something? And so on. So we had to define very strong rules and limitations to make sure our stretching shader could work in as many situations as possible. Designing puzzles within that framework became a real brain-teaser in itself.
The biggest obstacle in designing the puzzles, however, was the player’s lack of an inventory. It was both a design choice and a matter of narrative coherence. You are not playing the game, you are inside a video game, acting directly on its elements. You have no bag, no pockets, and you do not control the characters. You are a human player who has entered the game.
So if an object needs to be carried from one screen to another, it has to be physically and logically planned for within the environment.
What’s the appeal of making a meta story like this? And some of the unique challenges you’ve run into in the process?
The main strength of our previous production, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, was its meta writing. The relationship between the “game” and the “player”, with the fourth wall being constantly broken, is what made the game successful. And that meta aspect is something I absolutely love exploring.
In Crushed in Time, we had to preserve that meta aspect and that humor, because we know our fans will be watching us closely on that front. I wanted to tell a time-travel story, and I realized that, as far as I know, no one had really played with the idea of traveling through the production timeline of the game itself.
It is an incredibly rich narrative angle. I did not really find myself facing challenges so much as choices, because there were so many possibilities. And I am quite happy because everything I wrote, even the most delirious situations, made it into the final game. And I can tell you, we go pretty far with the meta time-travel idea!
Crushed in Time‘s comedy style is (in the demo anyway) a big part of its identity. What do you count among some of your comedic inspirations for the game?
It is indeed a comedy. I spent a lot of time working on the situations and the dialogue to make sure they were interesting, funny, and served either the story or the gameplay.
The humor in the game is very British. At least, that is what I hope. I am a huge fan of that kind of humor, often playing with the absurd, and of finely written, well-paced dialogue. There are probably hundreds of references unconsciously sprinkled throughout Crushed in Time, but when I look at the game as a whole, it makes me think of a Wallace & Gromit-style animated film: a burlesque adventure comedy that can make everyone laugh and feel something.
And inspirations for the striking visual style?
I am a huge fan of Day of the Tentacle. To me, it is my number one point-and-click game, and the inspiration behind its wonderfully twisted design is obvious. We had already paid tribute to that artistic direction in Chapter 2 of There Is No Game, but here we pushed it further, and in 3D. And placing cinematic cameras in an environment with completely broken perspectives is an absolute nightmare.
This very distinctive visual style also helps clearly separate the world of the Sherlock Holmes game from the other meta “worlds” we will visit.
Adventure games have broken out more frequently in the last few years, but are still sort of a niche genre. What do you think is appealing about this kind of game, and how do you think Crushed in Time stands out compared to others like it?
Apart from a few exceptions, I do not really feel that the genre has truly “broken out.” To me, it still feels very niche, far, far, far behind roguelikes and other farming simulators.
That is the main reason why we developed a new interaction mechanic. We hope it will allow the game to naturally move beyond the somewhat narrow “point-and-click” label and reach a broader audience.
Because I believe many players do not realize they might actually enjoy this kind of game. We just need to help them into the saddle and take them on a lovely ride.
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