GamesRelay

Name: Max and the Magic Marker

Max and the Magic Marker tries to prove the old adage - that the pen is mightier than the sword. While its been substituted for a marker, and a sword wouldn't be suited to platforming challenges anyway, the lesson still holds. Armed only with a marker pen and greatly varying amounts of ink, you are presented with fifteen obstacle courses rife with enemies and physics puzzles. Is it a Picasso, or doodles on a margin?

In what seems to be common fare for most indie games, the story is exceedingly simple. Max, a young child with startlingly vibrant orange hair, is scribbling away with childish joy with his markers. He creates a purple monstrosity called Mustachio, which suddenly comes to life and begins fleeing across the pages in front of Max. Just as any of us would do in a similar situation, Max draws himself into the scene, and must now use his big orange marker to bridge all the gaps he made in his creations. And that's it. Makes you wonder what kind of kid draws scene after scene of floating, grass-covered platforms? A budding game designer, perhaps?

Rather than telling a sweeping story, the game's premise leans heavily on the Magic Marker mechanic. Picking up floating orange balls during levels fills the pen, allowing you to draw shapes on the screen that materialise when you are done. This serves multiple uses, from bridging gaps to weighing down pressure pads. However, at each of the plentiful checkpoints, Mustachio displays his violet visage and sucks your marker dry. This serves the purpose of regulating the amount of ink you have to solve particular puzzles, but nothing usually stops you from returning to previous areas with large amounts of ink to find many of the collectibles you can find on your way.

While collecting beige light spheres is the common order of the day, their locations can be all over. From crowding the way on your mandatory path, they also line the way to large detours, daring you to go out of your way to collect them. Following these often put you quite a distance away from black orbs, of which there are a limited number in each level. Collecting them unlocks features in the Extras menu, but securing them is often difficult. From floating high up or being almost submerged in deadly, deadly seawater, finding and getting them all is a very commendable achievement.

The crux of the game is creativity. There are usually multiple ways of conquering the problems set ahead of you, and it's very possible that different people could experience very different methods of overcoming them. However, the game does fall into a Scribblenautsian trap. Given such freedom of command, it's very easy to use the same solution to overcome most problems. Rarely was drawing a bridge or a staircase not enough, and in most situations, drawing platforms and sticking them on top of each other could take me to the highest heights.

The first ten levels deal mostly in simple platforming, the last five are where the game's mechanics become more interesting and advanced however. These deal mostly with pressure pads, not just on the floor, but on the walls and ceiling. Overcoming these took a lot of pondering, and often took convoluted solutions where much more simple ones were probably available. Particularly, pushing a ceiling pad was achieved by creating a high stack of platforms with a diving board-like horizontal line at the top. By weighting the end hanging precariously over the precipice, I could get the back of it to rise and push the panel, opening the door for me to continue. This is just an example of the ingenuity required to overcome some of these later puzzles - shame it's only a third of the game.

It's also a shame that the technology becomes a hindrance to its enjoyment. While the physics are extremely well implemented, they aren't bug-free. In multiple occasions, in an attempt to scramble over the platforms that I've created, I would clip through the object and fall to my doom. In one situation, falling into the abyss wasn't enough to throw Max back to his last checkpoint, instead holding me in a purgatory beneath the textures. With no apparent way to kill myself, I had to restart the level from the beginning, when I was mere metres away from the end.

When switching to a pause mode where you can draw shapes without the hindrances of gravity and movement, sometimes the platforms wouldn't form when un-paused, allowing Max to fall to a cheap death. Worse of all, a game crash that would throw me to my desktop without any cause, warning or explanation, erasing any progress I made in that level, reared its vile head on a number of occasions. Also, with the platform-building focus lending itself to a steady, calculated hand, the impatience found by repeated attempts at a puzzle can prove to be greater than any enemy in the game. Draw them too high, and Max can't climb up them, draw them too crooked and Max will slide over them, draw them too steep and Max will slide down them. Often shutting the game down every now and then, losing your progress, is the only solution to maintaining the level of dexterity required to complete the game.

Nonetheless, while these problems do pervade and hamper the experience, the concept brings a lot of interesting game elements into play. While most solutions were apparent, the times when creativity was required to overcome them were very satisfying to complete. There's a deal of fun to be had, toying with the novelty of the marker at the beginning and dealing with the environments in the final levels, but it fails to make a great impression overall. The technical hitches are unfortunate and there is a lack of variety in the early parts. Some great ideas are only teased, such as trying to score a hoop in a game of basketball, but are not developed or even incorporated into the gameplay. This could be lack of ambition or conservativeness in design, but considering the creativity put into it, I conclude that it's the former. There's a great game in there somewhere, but sadly, it's only content to be good one.