Max & the Magic Marker Review

I don’t know which genre to place this one, so I will just call it ” creative interactive puzzle game”.

Let me tell you about a game called Max & the magic Marker, also known as Rakugaki Hero in Japan, is a game for WiiWare, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows.

“The protagonist is a boy named Max, who draws a monster with a special magic marker. The monster then comes to life, and Max must then get rid of the monster, with the help of the magic marker.”- Wikipedia.

I had the opportunity to play the PC release of this game.

It starts with a charming scenery where a little boy that looks an awful a lot like Calvin (in Calvin and Hobbes) lays on the ground drawing half crappy drawings that his parents will have to shamefully display on their fridge. He receives an envelope through the mail with his name on it. He opens it of course and behold, in there is a marker! So he stats to doodle with it.

Strangely to say he is a somewhat of a twisted child since the first thing he draws is a monster that resembles Mr Potato head, with a vicious looking mustache and a purple like body tone.

His name is Mustacho (obvious alert) and somehow Max ends up in his sinister twisted drawing (probably this makes him regret that he didn’t draw a lot of unicorns pooping candy). OK, well it isn’t all that sinister, it is actually very cute and picturesque. The objective of this game is to go through obstacles by drawing a way out/around/through them. Now if you have Parkinsons and do not have a steady hand, this might be a troublesome game for you.

Here is my first ladder. I know it’s not much to look at but as we all know, drawing using the mouse is hard. I can see how this game would be much easier on the Wii. If you find yourself puzzled and would like to pause the game to draw, you can do that. The image becomes a very hideous looking child doodle that you can make to look worse with your awful drawing skills.

In the picture above, I had to draw a platform in which to jump up on and use the water to hoist me up. So what I did was jump with my character, switched to “Stepping out of time” mode, drew the platform and went back to real time.

If you think you have unlimited marker ink, think again. The evil Mustacho keeps showing up at certain checkpoints and steal all your hard earned ink.

After finishing the first level I realized that this was actually quite entertaining. The controls are simple enough, the graphics doesn’t require much from any machine and very soothing. It’s challenging without being an ass about it. There are no difficult settings that I was aware off and if I was to label it, I would call the difficulty “recreational challenge”

Eventually you will succeed in drawing a handsome ladder like mine.

Yes, I am boasting. This thing took me 10 tries to draw!

I have so far encountered 3 in game characters. The green blogs that help you with tips and trix. the Mustache guy that steals all your fricken ink, and the mini pourple blobs with safety helmets. they wear them on and off because drawing a falling log that lands on their heads are the only way to eliminate them!!

This is a good game for anyone who has a few hours to kill or have kids. I can’t actually find anything wrong with it. Everything it was created for seems to work perfectly and there isn’t anything that interrupts the flow of the game. I will continue on venturing and keep exploring other levels of this game.