Drawn to Life Impressions

THQ showed off its upcoming action adventure game, Drawn to Life, at Nintendo's recent summer preview event. The unique game mixes tried-and-true action gaming mechanics with a healthy dose of touch-screen drawing. Though we weren't able to try out the funky game, we had a chance to get a demo of it, and it seems to get a lot of mileage out of the DS's touch screen.

The game's premise is a standard "help people in need" deal. You play as a hero out to help the entirely too chipper Rapoosas. It seems the festive, long-eared critters have had their village covered in an all-encompassing darkness that threatens their civilization. Things look pretty bleak, because the ebon force appears to be impervious to the overwhelming cuteness of the Rapoosas. Fortunately you've got some skills and, better still, weapons to help save the day.

The game appears to follow a pretty linear structure and will send you across four themed regions to fight off the darkness and its shadowy minions. From the look of things, you'll deal with evil in the conventional ways: head-stomping, shooting, and sword-slashing. What sets Drawn to Life apart from the pack is a large degree of freedom in its appearance. The hero, his weapons, and certain objects you encounter are limited only by your imagination (and the space available for you to draw in). Your hero is made of five slots: a head, a torso, left and right arms, and legs. Each slot is represented by a square or rectangular box you can draw in. It's up to you to decide what to fill them with. In the demo we saw, it appears you can be as ornate or sparse as you like with the detail. So you can draw anything from a stick figure to a full-fledged person. The same logic holds true with your weapons. The sword and gun we saw were made up of squares of various sizes in which you could draw anything you wanted. If all the freedom is overwhelming, you can choose different templates for your hero to either trace or add to. The drawing mechanic also extends to accessories or enhancements to your hero, such as flippers or a mask to breathe underwater. You'll simply draw them, in whatever level of detail you want, in the boxes provided on the touch screen. We also saw the mechanic applied to objects you'll encounter in the world.

The visuals have a storybook quality to them, and they have the same spirit as the sketchy, line-drawn look of Yoshi's Island for the Nintendo 64. The different themed worlds sport their unique looks with some nice flair. The Rapoosas' village is a fanciful locale, much like its residents, that will get progressively perkier as you rid their world of darkness. The look of your hand-drawn additions to the hero vary right now, with some fitting on top of his form and others not quite synching. But the idea behind it all is pretty cool, so we're hoping it gets tightened up a bit.

The audio in the work-in-progress version was still coming together. There seemed to be a mix of placeholder and final bits dropped in to set the game's tone. The roar of a serpent boss was sharp and menacing, but some of the weapon attacks and jump actions by the hero were modest. We'll be curious to hear what the final game winds up sounding like.

Based on what we saw, Drawn to Life should be a slick little title for the younger set. The game mechanics appear to be simple, with the real hook being the ability to create your character and many key items you'll encounter in the world. We'll want to spend some time with it to see if it's got that ageless quality that so many of Nintendo's DS games do. Drawn to Life is slated to ship this fall for the DS.