The Book of Unwritten Tales is the best adventure game to come out since last year’s Gray Matter from Jane Jensen. It’s another throw back to the glory days of Sierra Online and LucasArts point and click games.
The Book of Unwritten Tales features great voice acting, beautiful graphics, and a story that is chock full of jokes, witty comments, and a brilliant cast of characters. It has a lot in common with Gray Matter-you get to control more than one character, you can find all clickable items with a touch of the space-bar, and characters tend to hand invisible items to each other.
At the beginning many of the puzzles are pretty simple, such as combining a tennis racket with a web bag to make a butterfly net. But after a while the puzzles fall into the usual Adventure Game sort which involves having to do a bit of mind reading-what, exactly, does the game writer want me to do here? Since this is the real heart of an adventure game, I really can’t complain about having a hard time solving some of the puzzles and too easy a time with others. It was fun and I didn’t have to run to a walk-through with the same frequency I did with the last Sherlock Holmes game I played.
The best part of The Book of Unwritten Tales is it’s wonderful sense of humor. Small items are hidden in just about every scene, such as an archeologist’s room where we can find both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. The characters talk about adventure games and two are even obsessed with playing RPGs where they get to be bankers and accountants. There are references to World of Warcraft and Death makes an appearance wearing a pair of bunny slippers that bear a striking resemblance to Max of Sam & Max fame. I’m sure there were countless other gags that I didn’t get as I am not as up on the world of gaming as I could be.
This is a German game that has been translated into English, and it sounds pretty much perfect to me. But I guess this was not always so, there’s a joke near the end of the game about a problem with the localization.
The Book of Unwritten Tales
which features the voice work of Doug Cockle as Geralt of Rivia. Doug Cockle also has a role in The Book of Unwritten Tales as Nate the rouge, who sounds a lot more like The Tick than Geralt. Yeah, it’s called acting.
KING Art has done a great job.
