Crushed in Time Is A “Point-And-Pull” Adventure Game That Takes Holmes And Watson In A New Direction

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 28, 2025 | 9:00am

Video Games Features Crushed In Time

Crushed in Time Is A “Point-And-Pull” Adventure Game That Takes Holmes And Watson In A New Direction

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension was one of those unexpected critical and financial hits, a game that shattered the fourth wall into tiny pieces as it took players through multiple genres and countless meta puzzles. Now, a little over five years after their previous release, Draw Me A Pixel is once again returning to this satirical world—well, sort of. Crushed in Time is a spin-off that follows There Is No Game’s renditions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who accompanied the player during the point-and-click adventure section in Chapter 2.

Specifically, the premise of Crushed in Time is that on the launch day of a new Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson video game, its development studio discovers that a crucial non-playable character has somehow gone missing from the game, breaking the experience and triggering a wave of negative Steam reviews. To figure out what went wrong, you delve into this digital world, aiding these incompetent renditions of Baker Street’s finest to locate this missing NPC. To do this, you’ll have to travel back in time through the development history of this Sherlock Holmes game, sifting through its beta, alpha, and prototypes to piece together how such a critical bug was allowed to ship.

While our hands-off demo didn’t delve into the particulars of how jumping between different versions of the source code would work, we did see some other elements that set this adventure apart from its peers: it’s less about pointing and clicking and more about clicking and stretching. To be specific, instead of using mouse clicks to direct your character to pick up items, you instead click and then pull to solve puzzles and keep these doofus detectives on the right path. We saw three main types of interaction: after grabbing something, you can either tug on it, launch it, or spin it. When you hover your mouse over certain parts ot the environment, an icon will appear specifying how you can manipulate them.

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As for how this pans out, the very first conundrum we watched involved helping Watson enter Holmes’ study. To accomplish this, the player had to pull off a doorknob, fling it in an arc across the room, and then attach it to a nightstand drawer to access its contents. Most of these interactions are somewhat dynamic, letting you tug or fling in multiple directions. Timing also matters, and at one point, the player had to wait until Watson reached upwards to grab something before giving him a shove that sent him off balance, revealing something important behind him.

It’s a unique premise that showcased involved sequences within its first few minutes, as the person running the demo performed a quick combination of tugs and pulls on an obstinate Sherlock Holmes to help Watson finally access his office. While some of these puzzle sequences admittedly seemed a bit arcane out of context, we were assured that there would be both diegetic hints, as characters drop lines of dialogue to put you on the right path, as well as more traditional menu options to help out if you get stuck.

And beyond the nitty-gritty of its gameplay, it also just looks sort of fun to grab and yank on whatever catches your eye, like an entire game was built around Super Mario 64’s main menu—the dev giving us the demo admitted that they spent quite a bit of time on this screen.

It also certainly helps that the game features a 3D aesthetic full of off-kilter angles and exaggerated character designs that are so stylized they almost wrap into cubism. The angular, non-literal representation of this world matches nicely with the irreverent tone throughout, as the game pokes fun at these legendary characters; Holmes is even haughtier and Watson more agitated than usual. The comedy hijinks surrounding this pair have been quite amusing so far, setting the stage for a farcical adventure.

All that said, if there was one critical preconceived notion I had coming into this demo, it was that it seemed a little strange that Draw Me A Pixel was following up their ambitious There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension with a seemingly more traditional adventure game. Their previous title was a shotgun blast of different genres that took us through mini-RPGs, logic puzzles, and more as it cataloged the painful process of game development. That’s quite a tough act to follow, and it seemed a bit strange to me that their next project was going to be built around just one of the many digressions from their previous game.

But while what we saw of Crushed in Time didn’t seem as all-encompassing as its predecessor, thankfully, it appears to be channeling a similar degree of creativity into a more focused scope. Its point-and-stretch gameplay and irreverent humor establishes a playful vibe, while the new visual style translates the previous games’ pixel art versions of Holmes and Watson into a new dimension. Considering how clever these puzzles are in the few minutes I’ve seen, I can only imagine how off-the-wall things will get as you delve deeper into this game’s source code.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.