If you're going to try and woo a modern gaming audience with old-fashioned gameplay, you'd better be pretty special. The Book of Unwritten Tales is. It's smart, funny, well-crafted and has tons of heart.
Absolute masterpiece. The graphics are great for a 2011 game, the story is very engaging and the world around you is just **** great; you're in a temple solving puzzles and the next thing you know you're on a graveyard where you have the option to go to a shaman smoking weed or to a dragon's nest. If you like puzzle games this game is just a must play for u.
My first point and click game, and even to date it's the best one for me. Marvelous idea, funny characters and their adventures. I love the pop-culture references and many ways the creators poke fun and things. My favourite are accountant-MMORPG simulator :)
Take the best scenes from every major sci-fi fantasy imaginable, add in classic 90's puzzle solving, mix this all with a clever sense of humor, and A Book of Unwritten Tales emerges. The North American release will attract players familiar with the adventure game and those looking for something fresh in today's market. Despite technical problems and somewhat boring puzzles, the game proves that simple gameplay can convey a memorable experience.
Easily the most recommendable adventure game in years. The production values are top-notch, the puzzles are fair and most of the characters are simply adorable. If only the story would keep up its suspense and finesse after the second chapter, I would consider this game to be an instant classic of the entire genre. Ah well, there is always hope for the sequel, right?
Fairytale adventure is as magical as the land where it takes place. Not even the average playability can break this spell The Book enchants you with. [Nov 2011]
The Book of Unwritten Tales isn’t bad—it just feels like the developers weren't sure if they would rather homage LucasArts or ridicule Blizzard, so they tried to do both. Sadly, they succeeded only in making both aspects tepid and bland. That said, I would honestly recommend it to people who love adventure titles because beneath the fetch-questing is a solid game with quirky characters, decent puzzles, and some amusing self-aware humor.
This is not just the better point-and-click game i ever played, but one of the better gaming experiences i had so far. Awesome games like Machinarium are far, far away from The Book of Unwritten Tales. And the story... It's just amazing! It gets better and better while progressing. The final chapter is just... you must see it for yourself!
Point-and-click adventurers, RPGs and fantasy worlds lovers must have it! It is full of really funny references of a lot of known worlds like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings. Those who are familiarized with this kind of games will just stagger at the screen and probably will find themselves smiling alone while playing.
I wanted to see it on a movie, and although i can replay it, i'll miss the delight and freshness of discover it for the rest of my life.
Beautiful game, with lots of humor, although lots of jokes seem to be reference jokes and I often had the feeling I missed a few because of it. Gameplay is fine, but slow. Puzzles aren't really hard and sometimes a bit dull and unimaginative, where most of the obstacles are the usual mismatch between personal and developer's logic. The biggest problem I had with the game is the slow story development. It jumps from puzzle situation to puzzle situation without much, if any story progress. In the end I found the main story to be underwhelming. Even though play time was decent, I was surprised the game was already over and that this was it. The last part was even more a sidequest than part of the main story. The end seemed rushed and rather sudden, as if the developers were bored with the game themselves and just wanted to get it over with. Honestly though, while I had fun playing the game, I felt the same way at that time and was just happy it was done.
The graphics were really good. It is the first adventure game using 3D graphics i enjoyed playing, I liked the fact that they have kept the 2D gameplay style. Not like monkey island 4, that was just awful! (Hope someone makes a special edition of MI4 with 2D graphics!)
The multiple character gameplay is really great. Although it is a little annoying that the swap (switching between the characters) isn't instant because the characters have to walk back to their starting positions (unlike "day of the tentacle" where the swap is instant)
The storyline is good and there is a lot of (semi)funny references to the fantasy genre. The dialogues are wellmade and witty.
There is a lot of different beautiful locations. But there is not much room for exploring (unlike the kyrandia-games) there's only the screens you need. If you do not have a purpose wtih scene you simply can't go there. Which makes the game a little easier.
That brings me to the next topic the difficulty. This game is a too easy. The puzzles are very obvious and simple, do not expect to get challenged by this game.
'the only time I had difficulties was when I had the temple-bug.
Summary: A beautiful and funny game, but unfortunately it is way too easy,
As a long-time fan of point-and-click adventure games and fantasy role-playing games, I was eager to try out a game that mixed two of my favourite genres. However, I was sorely dissapointed. The game isn't exactly terrible, but it's just hopelessly mediocre. On the technical side, the game is simply gorgeous, but while the graphics of the game are good, a number of silly glitches and inconsistencies break any sense of immersion in the game (such as at the very beginning of the game where you see a gremlin writing in a book, the entire page visibly filled with text and the gremlin simply moving his quill left and right). However, on the whole the game's audiovisual style is very charming, even though some of the voice-acting is mediocre at best and the game's female lead takes the cake for being the most improperly dressed fantasy heroine for a long time. Furthermore, in addition to the sad portrayal of the game's female lead, the game features at least one bit character whose entire purpose in the game seems to be to serve as a platform for laughing at dainty men. While I wouldn't go as far as saying that the game's writers are ****, the said character seems to serve no other purpose than to be a target for jokes poking fun at his lack of traditional heterosexuality. Furthermore, the game suffers from very lackluster writing. One might be willing to forgive the game for its cliched plot, seeing as it's supposed to be a parody of fantasy cliches, but at the same time the game seems so earnest with its plot that it's hard to tell what is exactly being parodied. Most of the characters are flat and lacking in any real characterization, and for anyone whose read any Terry Pratchett the characters will seem like cheap imitations of his wonderful dramatis personae. This is further compounded by the fact that the game's cast is extremely small, a fact that the game takes great delight in pointing out. Furthermore, the game's world seems very empty and small, and I feel that the fantasy genre would've lent itself more easily to a more open-ended format in the style of Monkey Island 2 and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Now the game progresses very linearly, without so much as a hint of exploration.
It is also clear as day from the game's script that it is a translation of an originally German script: while there aren't any mistranslations per se, a lot of the dialogue doesn't sit well with the characters and doesn't seem very idiomatic. In addition to this, the subtitles are littered with the occasional misspelling and sometimes the transcriptions of spoken text to subtitle are completely off.
Related to the above point about the game being a very shallow parody, while the game obviously tries to be funny, for me it didn't lend itself to more than a few chuckles. Most of the jokes and gags seem to have been recycled from somewhere else and I noticed a few obvious nods towards gags from Lucasarts' classic adventure games, where the same jokes were better executed in spite of the technical limitations of the time.
With all that said, I guess I could recommend this game to you if you really enjoy point-and-click adventure games, but at the same time I feel that even with the lack of all that many new releases you could do a lot better. I do hope that the game's creators do keep at it, because the game does demonstrate great potential. Were the developers capable of making as beautiful a game as this with less of a linear story and more room for exploration, as well as a larger cast of characters and better writing, it would be a pleasure to play. As it stands, The Book of Unwritten Tales is nothing more than an ultimately disappointing little romp in the world of shallowly parodied and tired fantasy cliches that doesn't seem to be able to decide whether it wants to be taken seriously or not.
I was pretty disappointed with the speed of the game, sure the graphics are pretty and it follows the same pattern of it's point and click adventure predecessors, but the slow movement speed/walking ruined it for me, especially since it involved a lot of back and forth backtracking like it's inspiration.
SummaryIn a world torn by war, the aged gremlin archaeologist Mortimer McGuffin harbours the dark secret of a powerful artifact. Whoever calls this artifact their own will determine the fate of the world. While the Army of Shadows sends out its best and most devious agents to discover the secret, the Alliance's three heroes find themselves invo...