Crushed in Time brings Sherlock, Watson and cheerful incompetence to mobile on October 19

Draw Me A Pixel has confirmed that Crushed in Time is heading to Android and iOS this October, with App Store pre-orders now open and Apple's listing pointing to an October 19 release. The point-and-click adventure stars Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson following their memorable appearance in There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, although anyone expecting the calm deductive efficiency of literary Sherlock may wish to lower the intellectual thermostat slightly.

The premise involves a character disappearing just as a Sherlock and Watson video game reaches the market, sending the pair through the game's own development process to investigate what happened. That gives Crushed in Time an aggressively meta setup in which game production itself becomes part of the scenery, puzzles and comedy. Draw Me A Pixel describes it as an elastic adventure, which sounds considerably more dignified than saying the fourth wall has been put through industrial stretching machinery.

The iPhone and iPad listing currently marks the game as free with in-app purchases and gives it a 4+ age rating. Android is planned for the same October window. There are plenty of mobile puzzle adventures, but relatively few come from a developer with such a proven appetite for actively arguing with the concept of being a video game.