“Daymare Town” is one of those odd little games that’s hard to classify. On the surface, it’s straight out point-and-click adventure, but there are also elements of puzzle game to it, with a soupcon of RPG mixed in. Made by Pastel Games, and particularly the brainchild of game/puzzle designer Mateusz Skutnik, “Daymare Town” has become something of a legend in the annals of browser games, and hopefully some folk who haven’t yet had the chance to enjoy it will read this review and give it a whirl.

Technically, when I refer to “Daymare Town” as a whole, I’m talking about three games: “Daymare Town 1″, “Daymare Town 2″, and “Daymare Town 3″, but since they’re all quite short I want to examine all of them, and really reflect on the experience as a whole.

The premise of the game is the same throughout; your never-quite-properly-seen player character is trapped in a strange, near-empty town, and somehow must escape. There is no music outside buildings, and no voicework; just the sound of howling winds and the call of the occasional bird. This may sound dull, but it really adds to the atmosphere of desolation, and the isolation of your character. In “Daymare Town 1″, you seem alone at first, but the more you explore, the more shadowy figures you notice watching you. Eventually, you encounter others also seemingly trapped in the town, but never more than can be counted on one hand.

”Daymare Town 1″ is, in some ways, the purest of the three, perfectly capturing the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a strange, semi-abandoned world. But it’s also, by far the hardest. You have to click on EVERYTHING, and go back and forth multiple times; it’s extremely easy to miss vital items, or even doorways. In addition, the character also has to locate every bird they can, because…um…somebody likes birds. And some of them are near-impossible to locate. There are points when you will be stuck with no idea what to do because you missed an item that looked like a random squiggle or stone. Regardless, the atmosphere is deeply engrossing, and if you have any head for puzzles, you won’t quit until you’re out.

Of course, you don’t make it very far, because you immediately land at the gates of a new town. This town is a bit larger and more heavily populated than that of “Daymare Town 1″, but it’s also a lot more forgiving. No more mystery searching for birds, no more all-but hidden items, and a slightly more linear storyline. You’re slightly less isolated than in “Daymare Town 1″, since you immediately encounter and interact with different creatures, even bartering and trading with them. Notice I said “creatures”, not “humans”.

It’s also more obviously dark, involving moments like digging a maggot out of rotting meat, butchers walled up in their shops, and the Cherry Embassy (I am not going to say any more about that, because I don’t want to spoil it, but you will be freaked out). In addition, it also has a lot more choices. There are different ways to solve particular puzzles, and you can approach them as you choose. This gives you more of a feel of autonomy than you had in “Daymare Town 1″, and that carries you all the way through to the end.

Your escape from this town, however, ends pretty badly when you crash-land (don’t ask) in yet ANOTHER weird town. This one actually has a hospital, which is where you wake up after God knows how long. ”Daymare Town 3″ is so far the last in the series, though supposedly a fourth is in the works. In many ways, this game is the richest and most interesting, with the largest world and cast of characters. However, it suffers from what I’m going to call “Uninvited”-itis; you can pick up EVERYTHING, and need less than half of it to just finish the damned game. Of course, if you want to get all the achievements (another innovation for this third chapter), you’ll need almost all the items, but the hitch here is that you also have a limited inventory, and cannot drop things. It gets intensely frustrating trying to figure out what to carry, what to leave, what to buy, and what to sell. This is somewhat mitigated, however, by a refining of “Daymare Town 2″‘s choice system, in which you can decide how you want to proceed with your quest for freedom, and which items to use where.

On the other hand, we also have a bit of a return to “Daymare Town 1″‘s obscurity, although this time it’s in terms of the achievements rather than the story as a whole. That’s an improvement to “Daymare Town 1″, but it’s still beyond me how we’re supposed to figure out how to unlock certain achievements (including several where you have to give a number of items in exactly the right order to certain characters – get them out of order and it doesn’t count, oh, and you lose the items) without the help of a walkthrough.

Overall, “Daymare Town 3″ is unquestionably the richest of the trilogy, but my favourite has to be “Daymare Town 2″. While I love interacting with the other characters of this weird, Gahan Wilson-esque world, “Daymare Town 3″ does so to such an extent that you lose some of the howling isolation that made the first game such a unique experience. In addition, while “Daymare Town 3″ learned from its predecessors’ mistakes and offered a more linear, less elusive storyline, it added an achievement system which, in some ways, took the whole thing full circle. ”Daymare Town 2″, to me, offered the perfect balance of story, eeriness, desolation, and puzzles. It was also the game that gave me the most disturbing moment; there’s a point in the game where you have to enter a painting. In the painting is a house. In the house is another painting. Entering that painting, you find an identical house, with an identical painting. Entering THAT painting gave you an identical house…

It was late at night when I played that bit, and I was so genuinely unsettled I had to turn off my machine and go to bed.

All in all, “Daymare Town” in its entirety is an experience like no other. With unique, striking artwork, intriguing puzzles, and an atmosphere that can’t be beat, this is a town that’s definitely worth taking a trip to.

Hey kids remember this?

Well it looks like they’re building a brand new gnome hideout right in the middle:

The works on next Rewolucje album has begun. Three stories scheduled to appear in this one needed some small upgrades. Two of them were cosmetic (translation and cleaning), but the third one needed a solid upgrade. As in – complete inking. This is the story from the Cartoonia comic anthology, and it was all done in pencil and waterpaint. For the sake of the new album integrity this needed to be unified with the rest of the material, hence the redo.

It took an entire weekend to properly ink all 20 pages. (March 22-24, 2013).

Is such a speedy work any good? Well, here’s a small example of the outcome (compared to the original version for your convenience). You be the judge.

Would you recommend entering the art field for professional work?

That’s not something anyone can recommend. You’d have to feel it yourself, not be lured by someone else.

you can’t choose this field of career. it chooses you.

Would you recommend going to school for art?

Not necessarily. I didn’t attend an art school. Hence they didn’t shape me using their own definition of what an artist is.

being an artist is very personal and schooling can damage that. Not always, but there’s a risk.

Did you complete any schooling?

I graduated from a university, I’m an architect.

Did you always know you wanted to become an artist?

No. even when I already was I always hated that term. I didnt want to be an artist. I always considered myself a craftsman. But as years went by it turns out I actually am an artist, however admitting to that is cringing.

Can you name any artist/artists past or present who has influenced you directly, or whom you admire? 

Hugo Pratt, Wada Che Nanahiro, Amanita design, Regis Loisel, Enki Bilal, Nicolas de Crecy  and many many more.

How did you get to be where you are now?

Don’t understand the question. Hard work and commitment I guess?

How did you aspire to become an artist?

I didn’t. Aspiring to be an artist is the first step to NOT becoming one.

What helped you realize this career would be best for you?

I didn’t realize that. I still don’t know what would be the best career for me. That’s the whole point.

How should an artist approach developing a style that is commercially appealing?

No idea. I guess try to do something that will please everybody. Which is like the opposite of being an artist.

Tell me about your style. Do you find that to be ‘commercial’?

Have you seen my style? it’s so far removed from being commercial that I can’t even see the path in this dark daymare forest that would lead me to a commercial highway.

How has your style progressed, and how have you improved?

Uhmm…. How it progressed?  By repetition. You wouldn’t believe what years of training can do for an ungifted person, which is what I consider myself to be.

Do you mostly do digital art or traditional art, why?

There’s just an artificial separation between these two. I do my comic books the traditional way, because there’s no way to get watercolour to look remotely real using digital tools. And I do my games the way of the digital, because there’s no way to do that fast enough the traditional way. Both sides of that coin complement each other, I’m glad I found two separate outlets to cultivate both.

Do you work from life, or from photographs or from imagination?

1. imagination.

2. photos, but only when I need something concrete to look realistic enough.

3. from life? No, that’s for the proper artists.

Which is more important to you, the subject of your piece, or the way it is executed?

The subject is the most important thing in all form of storytelling, whether that be games or comic books in my case. The execution is just fancy clothes.

So I was asked lately to draw an autograph before shipping in one of the books somebody bought from me. Ok, no problem, I pick up the book and to my surprize there is a drawing already done. Not only that, that’s a drawing created in 2006. And I can’t remember doing that. Clearly something lost and found. So I tweaked it a bit and there you go – a drawing which creation spans over seven years.

The strangest thing was to see how much my technique changed during these years, and this hybrid of a drawing sporting the old and the new. Really strange.

So there.