Drawn To Life: Two Realms Review (Nintendo Switch)

Game: Drawn To Life: Two Realms
Genre: Puzzle, Platformer
System: Nintendo Switch (also on Mobile, Steam, PS4 and Xbox One)
Developer | Publisher: Digital Continue | 505 Games
Age Rating: US  E10| EU 3+
Price: US $9.99 | UK £8.99  | EU €9,99
Release Date: December 8th 2020

Review code provided by Alfred London

Drawn To Life debuted on the Nintendo DS in 2007. It made excellent use of the touch controls by allowing you to shape parts of the world. This was followed up with The Next Chapter but the series has lain dormant until now. Drawn To Life: Two Realms is made by a different team but continues on the story.

The Next Next Chapter

Drawn To Life: Two Realms LadiesGamers.com

Once again Mari calls to the creator (you) for a hero. So once again you draw the avatar of which you will use to help the residents of both worlds. As humans and raposa are being afflicted to act out of character. This time instead of exploring out you’ll use the book of imagination to fight inside their minds.

Drawn To Life: Two Realms LadiesGamers.com

Story progression takes you into small 2D platforming levels in groups of three (or more). You may simply need to get to the exit or destroy all the enemies first. Some levels require you to place particular enemies and obstacles before you attempt the level. This means both your platforming and thinking skills will be put to the test. As once playing there’s quite a short time limit. Even in the normal levels you’ll need to manipulate enemies to progress. This game can be challenging and a lot of the object placement levels may frustrate younger players. There are no lives, if you take too much damage you will have to restart the level. Since these are grouped if you quit out you’ll need to re-do the earlier ones.

Sketching My Way Downtown

Drawn To Life: Two Realms LadiesGamers.com

Outside of this you can explore the two towns to find challenges or collect coins to buy stickers or templates for your drawings. There’s a day and night cycle which changes locations of townspeople giving you different challenge levels but as you can skip time it’s largely pointless. For some strange reason you can’t run around town, making you awfully slow, instead you’ll need to walk into some sprint fruit which only lets you move fast for a short while. I preferred the challenge levels to main story progress as they were shorter and could be re-attempted for a better score.

Of course there is some drawing in this game, unfortunately on the Switch version you cannot use touch screen controls. This makes it very clunky even with added features. While you can purchase “toys” to use in some levels you do not draw any of this. Which is an extremely odd choice, it seems the only things Drawn To Life in this game are the hero, a few items and some decorations.

Crafted By The Creator

Drawn To Life: Two Realms LadiesGamers.com

The art style is somewhat based on the original with an isometric pixel art look for the towns, which is incredibly adorable. Set inside minds the levels look basic as there’s no longer any large locations to explore. The monsters are labelled as “toys” and are drawn but have a white outline really adding to the mobile look of it. The sound design itself is fine and of course there’s no voice acting (at this point it’d be a weird addition). Story wise it’s pretty bland, while they do make sure to keep it consistent with the other games the scenes between levels are tiresome as most characters have little personality to them. That said I didn’t experience any technical issues with the game.

Overall

The only good things I can say about this game is the cute appearance and the reasonable price. With drastic change in gameplay and the downplay of drawing this is a lackluster continuation.

Personally I didn’t find it fun or appealing even trying to consider it on it’s own merits, consisting only of tedious levels divided by boring cutscenes. If you’re interested in puzzle platformers I’m sure there’s better options, and as a fan of the series you’re better off ignoring this.

I don’t like it!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *