The Book of Unwritten Tales

This game is simply awesome and absolutely a must buy for any fan of adventure gaming! I don't say that lightly, as I have played many adventure games that failed to grasp my attention. This game harkens back to the golden ages of Lucas Arts adventure gaming featuring all the random, seemingly useless item collection, clever and often hilarious dialogue, novels of cheeky dialogue that can be discovered by repeatedly examining or combining items and clever but not impossible puzzles to set the pace of the game. puzzles to set the pace of the game. If you are a fan of classic point and click adventures like I am (Monkey Island is my favorite series, I also love Sam and Max, Loom, Grim fandango, etc) do yourself a favor and get this one for sure! You will not be disappointed, however, don't expect extremely deep and contrived puzzles, just support a developer that created one gem of an adventure game that will be enjoyed for many years to come as a classic.

This is one of those perfect point and click games where everything is spot on. The humour, the story, the characters, the graphics....everything is top notch. Worth buying just for the WoB sketches alone...

I do not like point-and-clicks, so it is entirely possible that I just didn't "get" this game, but it seemed to be deeply flawed. I found the puzzles to be more a matter of understanding the designer than the situation, but that is par for the course with point-and-clicks, so maybe I just don't "get it". The Animations were very poor when it came to objects. Character often pass visible absent objects to one another, objects that do appear often do not attach where they ought to, and when speaking lips often seems to be some sort of tight sneer or wild flapping, which didn't suit my sensibilities. The speech was entirely tolerable. Such things are very difficult and generally manage to convey where the voices originate but do not actually help matters either. This is a problem because animations involving objects(which are quite frequent) completely break any immersion. You are constantly reminded that this is just a game and that you are following a script. The story seemed too convenient in many places. The heroes were unlikeable, often going out of their way to sabotage people for failing to render assistance. Yes they were "saving the world" but they generally had no awareness of their situation, so they could have been doing all this for nothing. The puzzles seemed frustrating. Pressing spacebar would reveal clickable locations, but that missed at least one critical item, and the game is covered in clutter(pretty clutter to be fair), only some of which is relevant, so there is some unpleasant pixel-hunting. I found myself being prevented from doing the correct thing(which by all rights should have been possible) because I had not done something else that was only partially related. I often found myself repeating slow animations for trial and error, and thought rarely seemed to be rewarded. The humour was heavily meta(and inaccurate at that) and often just references. The characters seemed to mostly rely upon gimmicks rather than motivation or inclination...

This game is quite different from mainstream adventure/rpg games. First, it is cute, cartoonish, and brilliantly colorful. Second, the quest (or rather, puzzles) are just the right in terms of difficulty and complexity - you (probably) can solve them all, but you will need to use your brain to do so. Third, it is one of the most humorous games I ever played. Fourth, the story is excellent. Fifth, the gameplay is brilliant (and addictive). Sixth, it is surprisingly (in the positive meaning) violence-free, which is cool in the ocean of "kill-all-the-25562-foes-along-the-way"-type games. Seventh, it is so easy to learn to play it: handling is so simple, no manual or tutorial is needed. Eight, you don't need a powerhouse PC to run it (even in full HD) - even a midrange laptop will run it nicely. It is what it says: a (fairy)tale, where you play the main heroes. Highly recommended, a must have! Brilliant!

After having played through average and disappointing recent P&C games, it was really nice to finally get a solid experience again. So what makes this game so much better than other recent games, such as Deponia, or the really bad Runaway games? Well, to start with, you play a gnome with a noticeablen (but not too strong) German accent. You also play other characters that are decent enough, but there's just something about that gnome that makes everything better. I haven't loved a main character so much in a looong time. In addition, the atmosphere for this game is amazing. Everything just looks right, and the design team really earned their pay with beautiful areas to explore, and good music to boot. Now granted, this game won't tread any new ground in the genre. It has a few neat mechanisms, but it's still a P&C game. However, it's one where everything's done so solidly - the amount of humour and references, the logic of the puzzles, etc - that you will easily be able to overlook the rather clichéd main story. In short, if you like P&C games, buy this one!