Igyou no Machi no Annie: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Igyou no Machi no Annie is a freeware point-and-click adventure game created by Qpic, the officially recognized Physics Research Club of Kyushu University in Japan, and distributed on the Japanese free-game platform Freem in 2020. Set in a hand-drawn, black-and-white, picture-book world of misshapen figures, it is played entirely by mouse: the player clicks through a surreal town and solves its puzzles by examining each scene and dragging the items they find onto where they belong, all carried by original, hand-made artwork and music. Through its writer and character designer pickee, who went on to make For the Fish in the Bottle, it is the origin of this short, hand-made, monochrome point-and-click puzzle lineage: surreal black-and-white worlds explored by mouse, solved by looking and dragging, and built on entirely original art and sound.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
For the Fish in the Bottle Buried gem
A free Japanese point-and-click puzzle game, played entirely with the mouse, set in a hand-drawn, black-and-white, picture-book-surreal desert world. From a first-person view you wander the scene, examine what is there, and solve short, escape-style puzzles by finding items and dragging them onto where they belong, gathering the things a lonely fish trapped inside a bottle wants. A single run is about twenty minutes, with no time limit and no puzzles that lean on language, sound, or color, so it plays the same in any tongue, and the artwork and music are all original and hand-made. Made by the Japanese doujin creator pickee under the name makina game, released June 2026. Very Positive at 93 reviews and 99 percent. It already supports Japanese, English, Simplified Chinese, and Korean (about 28 percent of reviews are English), yet this free, short doujin gem is still largely undiscovered by the wider West.