Thumbs down to Doodles Navigating a Sidewalk: the Videogame!

Okay, okay. That was uncalled for. Actually, Drew and the Floating Labyrinth does a few things well, but not enough to recommend it to most people and certainly not for anything approaching the eight dollar asking price.

Floating Labyrinth is a puzzle game in which you attempt to navigate a path of floating cubes obscured by various visual tricks. The puzzles are largely well designed with each unique trick having 10 short levels dedicated to it, which - with the exception of a few outliars - increase in difficulty from a tutorial level to a fairly complex challenge that will take your average adult player a few goes to get right. It all comes together in the last approximately 20 levels where all the various visual conundrums are combined to good effect. For the most part, Floating Labyrinth never feels too easy or controller-snappingly difficult, though there were a fair amount that I ended up solving by tricky jumps rather than actually using logic and a few that are less puzzles than they are exercises in patience.

One could argue the biggest drawback of the puzzling in Drew is its small offering of gameplay. Now, 80 levels sounds like a good deal on paper, but when you ignore levels that are purely vehicles for the story and effortless tutorial levels, it feels short. I finished the game completely in less than two hours of casual play. If the quality of the game is dragged down by its length, perhaps it could bring a strong story and visual style to the table. If it did, 60 or so competently designed levels might even be a perfect length; ending before the game overstays its welcome. Unfortunately, while the minimalist sketch-like visuals and use of color are pleasing to the eye, the narrative framework is weak.

You play as a young girl seeking a way home, guided only by a soothing voice revealed to belong to a bird that offers periodic (and just a bit too repetitive) advice. Already we have the indie formula of "small child navigates a bleak, frightening world," so it's fair to say there will be a loss of innocence and possibly some kind of twist or pseudo-philosophical pretensions. Yes, Floating Labyrinth did indeed hit evey branch on its fall out of the indie tree, and basic awareness of "artsy" games will leave you feeling a bit blasé at the end; exactly the opposite of the emotional impact the game is fishing for. Ultimately, though, I believe the narrative fails because it lacks the dialogue-free story open to interpretation of something like Limbo, nor does it offer enough to characterize Drew, her guide, and their relationship as done right by, say, Portal. The dialogue between them consists of only a handful of vague sentences for the entire first half of the game and I just never felt invested.

Technically, Drew is okay. It does noticably lack polish that quickly identifies it as being largely the work of one man; I assume a student showing off the culmination of all their hard work. You can tell by minor things like the inability to rebind keys after launching the game and an entirely royalty-free soundtrack (which is very samey between levels). That said, it played fine, I encountered no bugs, and it looks genuinely good.

So by now you might be thinking, "if the game has some good puzzles and a unique visual style, surely it's still worth my time?" Well, no. I can't really recommend it on that alone. Sure, some puzzle aficionados or lovers of good art design might enjoy Drew, but at the end of the day it's a middling experience. And it's a middling experience being offered for more money than better indie puzzlers, as well as some free ones. I'd place Floating Labyrinth above something you get for free to play on your phone, but sadly, only just. I'd get this game for maybe one or two dollars tops to enjoy the bite of artsy puzzling goodness it offers, but I'd suggest you leave off otherwise.

I do hope we see more from Dust Scratch Games in the future, though. With more amibitous writing, a little more polish, and a willingness to keep trying new ideas, the result could be a great game.

Gosh, this was a dull review. Let's try this: I'm giving this game the bird because that's all it gave me!

Well....

It's a fairly interesting puzzle platform game (yes, platform, not platformer). If you think you would enjoy a puzzle game in which you are trying to use clues to traverse a path of blocks, I do recommend it. I enjoyed it, with the exception of one of the levels which had absolutely no way to "solve" it without simply doing trial-and-error and falling again and again.

That brings me to the first complaint I had. The companion Drew has helping her through this puzzle space is very willing to tell you the advice for the current sequence of stages. The first time he says "shadows can tell you something about your surroundings" [slightly paraphrased], it's helpful... the eighth time he says the same thing, I started having flashbacks to Zelda OOT's Navi "Hey Listen!". This could be solved by putting an option to turn off the random "help" in the options, but the option screen is somewhat bare, with no option to turn off the repetitive comments.

My second issue: Its length. This game is very short. I completed the whole game blind [no previous information] in 90 minutes, which is actually much shorter than how long it took to download the game (how is this game so big and so short?). Anyway, that's really just a minor issue in my book, but I figure I should mention it just in case it's important to you.

My third issue: Every time you finish a level, which in some cases can be <15 seconds, it sends you back to the level selection screen. This seems fairly redundant, as unless you want to skip levels (and make the game even shorter!), you'll just be going to the next level. It makes the game feel less like a contiguous story and more like a free flash game you would play online.

Again, I do recommend it, as long as you're in the target audience. The first and third issues above could theoretically be fixed by a small patch. The second could make-or-break-it for you, but I find length less important than other issues.

I'm sorry for whoever bought this. I had this game sitting on my game list from some bundle and totally regret adding it to my library.

The puzzles and game mechanics arent that bad but are rather simple, enough to get bored after a couple minutes. The biggest offender for me is the artstyle, you don't advertise a hand drawn game when your drawings has the appeal of a 3 year old doodles and scrabbles.

En palabras cortas: menudo bodrio. Conseguí este juego de algún bundle y lamento por completo haberlo agregado a mi librería.

Las mecánicas y acertijos del juego no son malas pero simples, tan simples que aburren en cuestión de minutos, lo peor realmente es el estilo visual. No entiendo como el desarrollador habla del arte hecho a mano como una cualidad cuando parecen garabatos de un niño de 3 años.

Have you ever been in a really bizarre surreal dream and thought to yourself, "You know what would make this better? Monochromatic shading, color-based puzzles, shaky controls, and an endless capacity to fall to my doom!"

If no: Congratulations, you're normal.
If yes: Then this is truly the game for you.

I think the concept is here but the execution doesn't quite match.

For starters, the gimmick of the first world is reeeeally tedious, and another of the gimmicks is practically pointless. The rest of the gimmicks are pretty decent though, and each have a world dedicated to them (except the last two, which share a world). Once the first five worlds pass, you get levels mixing two of the gimmicks together, and in the last world, you get a few brief gimmicks and a few three-gimmick levels followed by a six-gimmick one.

The game is entirely these gimmicks, though, and some levels can be broken just by jumping across a small gap. As well, there's basically no penalty for dying, so the game devolves into trial and error, especially in places where two or three gimmicks don't mix well leading to convoluted levels in the last two worlds.

The visuals aren't very interesting and the music's pretty bland, the voice acting I really dislike and the story isn't that special, the game's basically an extended metaphor but there's not really that much suspense involved and the ending isn't much of a resolution. I didn't come to this for the story though.

For $5, this game is definitely not worth it. For $2, maybe? It's not very long, either, so...
I can't say I'd recommend this game based on all these things, but it's not a terrible game by any means, more a mediocre one.

The biggest enemies in this game are the sluggish menu and the lack of proper camera controls. I can rotate the camera 360 and yet lock it in only 4 points?

Also depressing as all heck.

This is a game with lacking voice acting, disjointed visuals, and not-the-best controls. I recieved this game as part of a bundle I purchased. I try to play every game in my library a minimum of ten minutes to start with, but I only just barely made it, having to open the game back up a week after my original 6 or 7 minutes just to play it those few extra minutes. My first play through I made it through a handful of levels and couldn't handle it anymore. The slightly helpful companion voice, the music I don't even remember now, and the bad voice acting of the character just piled on top of the weird mechanics of the levels.

I basically got this game free because it wasn't the reason I bought the bundle and I do not want this game, I know I myself won't ever play it again other than maybe to leave it open to get the trading cards because my experience was certainly sub par. While I wouldn't reccomend this game, I'm sure there are some people out there who would like it, for me the graphics alone are a big deterrant. If at some point they updated the game and improved it, I would maybe play again, but as it is now, it's not for me and I have lots of other games I can spend time playing instead.

Only takes an hour or so to walk through the game. A solomn and dreamlike, but minimal 3D puzzle platformer, with a simple, but sad story. There's a heavy emphasis on memory and camera perspective, which are both used with intentional symbolism.

Every once in a while you'll unexpectedly pull a gem of a quote out of a random publishing such as a small game like this, or some article. That happened here. This game somewhat offhandedly posits one of the most elegant descriptions of purgatory I've ever heard. If that makes you curious, spend the little bit of time to quietly absorb the story of this game while walking through the casual, but slowly ramped up puzzles.

P.S. The game does not appear to account for multiple monitors and lets the mouse cursor wander out of the game, which makes proper camera control impossible. To recitfy this, I used MouseJail, a very old but still functional (on Win7 64-bit even) little program. Note that using this requires you to run the game as a parameter of MouseJail.exe, which means Steam won't see the game as running and won't be able to record your time or run its overlay or any of that other fancy Steam-y stuff.

This game is very minimal but also very clever. The levels are mazes made of invisible floating platforms. As you try to figure out where the path is you will be mentaly challenged and take a leap of faith with every step. That is the story of this game it is minimal, the graphics are nothing special, and this is the first game of an small development team. Yet if you take a leap of faith with it you will not regret the purchase. It has clever and challenging puzzles, unique mechanics, and an effective story.

Walk the invisible path of boxes and fall simuator. The mechanics constantly have you looking at the box the character is standing on and away from your destination which is uninviting, unintuitive, and causes the frame to contstantly be empty. The boxes do not rise up fast enough which causes the character to walk on nothing for several frames. Music is bleak and quickly annoying. Gameplay was repetitive, uningaging and quickly became boring. I did not bother beyond the first series of stages.