Crushed in Time Review - Elementary My Dear Friends?

Seren
Jun 10
9 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEb1yaQVvEY

As a certified Brit, I have seen many renditions of Sherlock Holmes and his partner in crime, John Watson, embarking on different strange adventures. From the famous Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman TV portrayal to the very obscure combo of Herlock Sholmes and his adopted daughter Iris Wilson in The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. These classic characters are either made epically cool or hopelessly dumb, but they are a joy to see on the screen in any medium, and the game is afoot yet again as the pair are at their silliest in Draw Me a Pixel’s puzzle adventure game, Crushed in Time.

Crushed in Time is a sort of spin-off of the developer’s first game, There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, where you traverse different video game universes in a point-and-click adventure. One of these universes included Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and the team must have loved them so much that they decided to give them their own game. Sticking with their ongoing theme of 4th wall breaking and subverting expectations of what a traditional game is, Crushed in Time sees a developer dive into its world to figure out where a missing character has gone. This will take you and the mystery duo on a dimension-hopping, time-travel adventure to the core of the game’s creation.

When you think about puzzle games, you probably automatically think of a standard point-and-click mystery, especially when Sherlock Holmes is involved. You click on the clues and piece together evidence you find to make a deduction. Well, Draw Me a Pixel does away with that convention and opts for a ‘point and pull,' a more physics-based approach to how you interact with your environment. Instead of just pointing and clicking, you’ll find every key item has been elasticated. You are chucked into these bizarre mechanics straight from the title screen, and they do take some getting used to, not just because you may not have physics on the brain but because they go against how a game naturally acts. Every necessary item is highlighted when you drag your mouse over it, so I didn’t find myself aimlessly searching for the combination of furniture I needed to solve a puzzle, but it took me some time to confidently utilize each mechanic and item.

In the opening puzzle, it’s your job to wake up Holmes to unlock the office door to let Watson in. You can interact with objects, like a noisy telephone to wake Sherlock up, but the main focus is to shuffle pieces of furniture and different items around. For example, you need to propel a doorknob across the room to land in a drawer so you can open it and grab the key. Later on, even gravity will serve as a puzzle, as you must figure out how to use a jar of honey to get a letter down from the ceiling. At first, the gameplay felt unnatural as I found myself trying to drag items rather than elasticate them forward, but after the first chapter, you get into the swing of things. However, once you feel like you have a grasp on Crushed in Time’s mechanics, the game only gets harder and more intricate in its puzzle physics.

A chapter later on had me scratching my head more than a few times as the pair found themselves in a different dimension where you need to go into a menu to attach different properties to items—reminiscent of game development. For example, you could mix up whether an item could be interactive, could be spun at a 90-degree angle, or could be attached to a water feature. At first, I was in awe at how fun and engaging these puzzles were, but as they became bigger in scale and more features began to be added, I found myself grasping for hints a bit too often. The hint system itself is incredibly useful if you are stuck, as when you enter its menu, key items that need to be used in the puzzle will each have their own set of hints to unlock. It’s entirely up to you how many you use as they become progressively more blatant in telling you the solution. However, I found some minor puzzles didn’t have their own set of hints, which was especially troublesome when I arrived at a puzzle to do with Emma and a portrait that was simply not clicking for me.

Overall, the puzzles were an absolute delight in their physics-based approach but also just in their sheer range. Crushed in Time is only a brief adventure clocking in around 7 hours of playtime, but every chapter felt like a natural evolution of mechanics we had just spent time comprehending. It also was just incredibly fun to see puzzles intertwined with game development and other software, like the brief stage that took place on a Game & Watch.

The story of Crushed in Time melds well with how silly and unconventional the puzzles are and makes for a charmingly good time. Straight away, the 4th wall is demolished as the player takes control of the developer of Sherlock Holmes’s game. After noticing a key character has gone missing, the game is review-bombed, and it’s your job to dive in and solve the glitch alongside your witty companions. This will take you through several stages of the game’s development to find out what went wrong, which sets up a lot of fun and innovative puzzles all to do with the intricacies of coding and software. It’s best to go into this game relatively blind, as each stage was a delightful surprise in its innovation, and to be honest, explaining it can be difficult in how wacky it becomes.

Paired with the bizarre story is a cast of bombastic characters, including the famous detective duo, a dimension-hopping straw man named Emmet, and Watson’s supposed love interest, Emma Files. This rendition of Holmes and Watson is over-the-top goofy and uses a dynamic that I always love to see when the pair are on screen. Instead of Holmes just being the genius stoic type who feels like he is above us simple mortals, he is incredibly childish, selfish, and often a bit dumb. Watching things miraculously fall into place just for him to claim it was all his idea never failed to get a chuckle out of me. I also loved his banter with Watson, as he often treats him like he’s a dog or a misbehaving child. Watson is also just as lovable as he often grumbles about acting as a servant for Holmes and has that level-headedness missing in his partner, which balances them out.

I especially enjoyed the game’s sub-cast and the duo's dynamic when fiery lady Emma Files is added. She acts as a tongue-in-cheek take on the misogyny often found in Sherlock Holmes’ adaptations, as she is characterized as just as intelligent, if not more so, than Holmes. However, he meets that with frustration and a ton of sexist remarks. I can see this turning people off the characters, as I didn’t find his comments that funny and her reaction quite stereotypical. Of course, it’s all done for comedic effect, but I often didn’t find it that funny. In one sequence, Emma is trying to drive a car through time and space, and Holmes is an absolute nuisance just commenting on her poor driving skills. It’s kind of like the jokes your dad would make. She reacts in an explosive way as her head gets cartoonishly large and she speaks in a scary grumbling tone. The gag is fine, albeit a bit uninspiring. Her other gag is that she is in love with Watson, which I found to be a lot funnier. Each time she compliments him, she holds out her hand only for Watson to make obscene kissing noises and smooch her hand for way too long, much to Holmes's disgust.

The sound design that accompanied every elastic pull was satisfyingly bouncy and rubbery. Just pulling and releasing the characters' faces gave me immense satisfaction and meant I got the achievement for yanking their faces 100+ times a bit too quickly. The sounds of twisting a handle or swinging light bulbs overhead all had unique sound effects, which made spending time figuring out a particularly hard puzzle that bit more engaging. If I had no clue what was going on, I would sit there pulling objects in all directions just to help me bounce ideas around in my head.

The music also matches the vibe of the game extremely well. The dramatic jaunts through space and time have music that feels like you are being sucked in and chucked about, and you have your standard curiously whimsical tracks as you solve puzzles. If I’m being honest, I was more in tune with the sound effects of the items and characters to really listen out for its music, but in its more dramatic moments, the music felt aptly dramatic and orchestral, like a Back to the Future vibe.

I would also like to note how stellar the voice acting is for every character. Watson is gruff, Holmes is a tad whiny, and Emma has a refined elegance to her speech. I can imagine people going crazy for the British accents here, as they are full of character. With no fault to the voice actors, however, I felt like the lines of dialogue they spoke idly while waiting for me to figure out a puzzle were really annoying in how often they spoke. They would cycle through some lines, but once they began to repeat, I found myself getting really frustrated.

Crushed in Time’s visuals are just as cartoonish as the rest of the game and gleefully bounce between different styles, from the game’s usual 3D models to 8-bit. There are a ton of styles to love in the game. Now, I’m a bit young to understand the inspiration behind the visuals, but a little bird has told me that the style is very reminiscent of Day of the Tentacle, also known as Maniac Mansion. These games are characterized by their exaggerated character designs, and you can see this in the low face of Holmes that comprises 70% hat and 30% mustache and the stumpy shortness and beady glasses of Watson.

The environments are also just as vibrant as the characters, as the furniture and architecture all have an angular look to them. Everything is cartoonishly slanted and warped just like Day of the Tentacle and the cartoons of my childhood. This aesthetic pairs well with the different dimensions we see across the game.

The only bugs/glitches I found in Crushed in Time were the ones plaguing the characters; apart from that, it was a completely smooth experience. I loved reading some Gamescom interviews with the developers and how complicated it was to make pixels elasticate, but the team did a fantastic job, and every pull and grab I executed was seamless. Nothing felt unnecessarily clunky, and everything was signposted, so the obscure puzzling didn’t feel impossibly challenging; it felt like a satisfying learning curve. However, in terms of accessibility, it would be nice to add an option that highlights interactable items more clearly. Everything seems interactive when you first boot up a puzzle, so making them stand out more would be a nice touch.

There are several ways to play Crushed in Time, using a controller, mouse and keyboard, or touch screen. I only got to sample the mouse and keyboard, which worked like a charm, but dragging items with my mouse felt clunky maybe once or twice during my playthrough, specifically in quick-time events. Sometimes I’d mis click and miss a window to propel an object forward, mounting up some frustration. I’d like to think this experience would be optimal on an iPad due to the literal physics of the puzzles and how easy it would be to swipe items across the screen, so it is an option I would definitely check out.

As I play more puzzle games, I often find myself satisfied by them but never sufficiently challenged in a way that has me bending my brain to adapt to what the game’s physics want me to do. Crushed in Time is a breath of fresh air in the genre with not only unique and innovative challenges dictated by elasticity but also puzzles and environments melded with game development that might make you go, "Ah, that’s how they do it." It’s extremely charming and paves its way into the Holmes and Watson cinematic universe, with charming, kooky renditions of the characters that everyone will recognize and love. It can be quite a hard game to get used to due to its unconventional mechanics and skimpy hints, but as you take on more puzzles, you’ll find yourself on a satisfying learning curve that propels you through space and time, and that’s why Crushed in Time gets the shiny silver genie lamp.