Puzzle and platform games where your imagination is more important than linear, typical ’skill’ are coming into their own lately, and Max & The Magic Marker is throwing itself into the fray with an interesting premise: You take control of a young boy named Max, who armed with the titular magic marker is taken into the world of his childish sketches. He’s not very impressive on his own, so it’s up to you to draw the things he’ll need to make it to the end of each stage.
You should have reasonable expectations about what Max & The Magic Marker can do. The game’s website vaguely implies but never outright states that you can draw anything. They instead accurately describe it as a ’physics based’ game, because most objects you can draw react based on their geometry, line composition, and density as physics objects. In other words, you can draw a big sledgehammer if you want but it’s not going to do any different than just drawing a huge, filled-in circle to represent a boulder; both will just fall and slam into things.
Thus the real challenge comes in figuring out how your lines will interact with the world. You’ll often encounter gaps too long to jump across, so drawing a curved line from the edge of one land mass to the other will create what amounts to a bridge. And just like on your old Etch-a-Sketch, you can draw alternating horizontal and vertical lines to create stairs... just be sure to draw a support beam beneath them or have the top stair rest on a solid surface, otherwise it’s going to topple. Solid platforming skills can overcome the need for any drawing at all in a few segments, but generally speaking you’ll need to get good at sketching useful shapes.
It’s not just ramps and stairs though. You will need to draw weapons (a boulder falling on various enemies, for example), defensive tools (a covering over Max to shield him from deadly rain and volcano eruptions), and manipulate your environment (such as putting a heavy weight on one platform to raise another so Max can ride it to his destination). Your arsenal is admittedly limited just by how the game behaves, but the physics are well done and ensure that not every stage boils down to just drawing ramps from one point to the next. This variety is important, because most stages can be cleared in three to ten minutes on your first run through them, though you’re urged to do repeat plays to get a faster time and find hidden items; doing so unlocks various features.
Max & The Magic Marker isn’t a game of unlimited potential, but for $10 you shouldn’t expect it to be; your drawing options are somewhat limited and you only have fifteen stages to play. However, it is fun and your 1000 Points/$10 is a fair price for what you get; the experience will be short but definitely enjoyable.
