Drawn (series)

Lore & Background

The Drawn series began with Drawn: The Painted Tower, released on September 8, 2009 for Windows and OS X, and later on December 9, 2010 for iOS. The player must locate and rescue Iris, a girl with the magical ability to turn drawings into real objects, from the Painted Tower. This mechanic is used throughout the game to solve puzzles.

The second installment, Drawn: Dark Flight, was released in collector's edition on September 1, 2010 and standard edition on October 5, 2010, continuing Iris's story as she escapes the tower and needs help lighting three beacons in the Kingdom of Stonebriar to become queen and dethrone the dark King. The third game, Drawn: Trail of Shadows, released on October 18, 2011 for Windows and OS X, tells a story of a young boy trapped in a painted world by an evil wizard, as recounted to Iris by her guardian.

A remastered reboot, Redrawn: The Painted Tower, was released on November 5, 2021 by Friendly Fox Studios, featuring updated graphics.

Reader's Guide

The Drawn series is significant as a well-received casual adventure franchise that successfully integrated hidden object and puzzle gameplay with a strong narrative and distinctive hand-drawn art style. The first game, The Painted Tower, was nominated for Casual Game of the Year at the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and Trail of Shadows was nominated for Downloadable Game of the Year two years later. Adventure Gamers ranked The Painted Tower the 76th-best adventure game ever released in 2011. Critical reception was generally positive: Gamezebo gave The Painted Tower four-and-a-half stars and Dark Flight five stars; IGN rated Dark Flight 7.5 (Good); and Eurogamer gave Dark Flight an 8/10, praising its visuals and atmosphere while criticizing its short length and abrupt ending. The series' legacy includes a remastered reboot in 2021, indicating enduring interest in its artistic and gameplay style.

Did You Know?

• Adventure Gamers named The Painted Tower the 77th-best adventure game ever released in 2011.
• The remastered reboot, Redrawn: The Painted Tower, was developed by Friendly Fox Studios, not Big Fish Studios.

From Text to Three Dimensions: The Evolution of Adventure Gameplay

The adventure game genre traces its roots to the mid-1970s, when Colossal Cave Adventure, released in 1976, established a template that countless developers would follow. In those early days, players typed commands into a text parser, which translated their words into in-game actions, creating an entirely textual interactive narrative. As personal computers grew more capable in the late 1970s and early 1980s, designers began layering graphics over the text interface, and eventually the point-and-click paradigm took hold, replacing typed verbs with mouse-driven interaction. Subsequent hardware improvements opened the door to real-time and pre-rendered three-dimensional environments, as well as full-motion video captured from first- or third-person viewpoints. Today, the genre frequently blends with other formats, yet its core identity—driven by exploration and puzzle-solving within a story—remains recognizable across every technological iteration.

Puzzles, Narrative, and Genre Boundaries

At its heart, the adventure game is defined by three pillars: storytelling, exploration, and puzzle-solving. Marek Bronstring, former head of content at Sega, described the genre as puzzles embedded within a narrative framework, where story content is unlocked gradually as the player progresses. Combat and action challenges are deliberately limited or absent, setting these titles apart from action games, though some adventure titles incorporate a minigame drawn from another genre—a practice that purists often frown upon. The genre also draws a clear line from role-playing games, which rely on numeric stat systems, internal economies, and tactical opponents, none of which are hallmarks of adventure design. Pure puzzle games, meanwhile, revolve entirely around problem-solving, whereas adventure games scatter puzzles throughout a broader exploratory and narrative experience. The puzzles themselves lean heavily on conceptual reasoning and lateral thinking, expecting players to apply real-world knowledge rather than relying solely on in-game information.

A Genre's Rise, Fall, and Indie-Driven Revival

In Western markets, adventure games enjoyed their golden era from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, a period when the genre was widely regarded as among the most technically ambitious in gaming. By the early 2000s, however, the rise of first-person shooters had pushed adventure titles into a niche corner, and publishers grew reluctant to back new projects in the category, leaving developers struggling to secure funding. The tide began to turn with the explosion of independent game development. Crowdfunding campaigns gave creators a direct line to enthusiastic audiences, while the widespread availability of digital distribution platforms made it feasible to release games in episodic installments rather than as single large packages. The proliferation of new hardware—portable consoles and mobile devices—further expanded the audience base. Together, these forces sparked a genuine resurgence, allowing the genre to thrive outside the traditional publisher-driven model that had once stifled it.

East Meets West: Divergent Paths in Adventure Design

While Western adventure games have historically emphasized richly interactive worlds and intricate puzzle chains, their Asian counterparts have carved a distinctly different path. In Japan, visual novels account for nearly seventy percent of all PC games released, making the narrative-driven format a dominant force in the domestic market. Asian developers have also successfully targeted portable and mobile gaming devices, finding strong audiences for story-focused titles on smaller screens. The pacing in Japanese adventure games tends to be slower, with a heavier reliance on dialogue to drive the experience forward. Western titles, by contrast, typically prioritize complex puzzle-solving and more physically interactive environments. These differences are not merely stylistic; they reflect entirely separate development histories and cultural expectations about what a story-driven game should feel like. Both traditions, however, share the fundamental commitment to placing the player inside an interactive narrative where exploration and discovery take precedence over combat.