Where is Drake?

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Where is Drake?, sometimes listed all as one word, WhereIsDrake, is a Where’s Waldo-style “find the hidden character” Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024. In this game, players follow the journey of the eyepatch-wearing pirate Drake and try to find where he’s hiding in each scene… or at least, that’s the idea.

In practice, Where is Drake? is wildly inconsistent, and the rules the game sets for itself are constantly changed and even outright broken. Early on players get one and later two eyes that they pop into their unnamed character’s head in a menu, enabling to see Drake when he is otherwise invisible… but he’s invisible in different ways at different times, and there doesn’t seem any rhyme or reason as to why – sometimes you need one eye, sometimes both, sometimes none. This leads to you having to constantly pop into your menus to change out the eyes you’re using to see if that’s why you can’t find Drake. To say this is needlessly annoying is an understatement.

Sometimes you must interact with the environment to reveal Drake, clicking on hiding spots or clicking on holy statues to bring down an almighty foot to smash the scene, revealing Drake. Sometimes, you’re not even looking for Drake, but something else. At one point, Drake inexplicably no longer has his facial hair (after multiple levels where you need to skip over other characters with eyepatches and no facial hair). And while each level has a little intro card telling you what to look for, it isn’t clear about anything like this, leading to your search being trial-and-error… but a trial and error where you only have three wrong chances and then you need to start over, and if you use two and find Drake on the third then for the rest of the game you’ll only have one chance before having to start over.

It’s absolutely infuriating.

Making things even worse, the controls here are absolutely terrible. You move the cursor with the left stick and scroll the screen with the right stick, but the screen can sometimes take more than a few seconds to start scrolling, making you wonder if it’s broken. What’s more, the hit detection for stuff you’re trying to click on is both very finicky, and then at times all too eager to click on things you’re not trying to click on.

The game’s presentation makes use of colorful but somewhat off-putting cartoony 2D pixel art visuals backed by a quiet, subdued soundtrack, with creepy characters popping up on occasion, I suppose to try to jump scare you. And later levels get increasingly bloodier and more unsettling. I suppose the idea here was to make this one of those games that seems innocent and family-friendly at first, only to gradually turn into a Horror game. However, the game never really looks all that innocent, and the elements that one might describe as Horror are never really scary. Also, there is absolutely nothing in this presentation that justifies the game’s over 1GB of file size.

In the end, Where is Drake? absolutely fails to do anything it’s aiming for. It’s so wildly inconsistent that it fails as a Puzzle game, the controls are terrible to the point of being rage-inducing, it’s not cute, it’s not funny, it’s not scary… and in the end, it’s just not worth playing.

tl;dr – Where is Drake? is a Where’s Waldo-style Puzzle game about finding an eyepatch-wearing pirate in various scenes, and it seems to want to be some sort of subversive Horror experience too, but it fails at just about everything. The game design is wildly inconsistent to the point where it doesn’t work as a Puzzle game, the controls are terrible, it’s not scary enough to be a Horror game, and while some may find its odd, offbeat nature appealing, most players are much better off staying away from this one.

Grade: D-

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