The Book Of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles

If you liked BouT1 and / or 2 you can't do anything wrong buying this. It has the same humour, more of the known puzzles and tells the story of Nate and the Critter. For me i played it for about 7 hours until i was finished. Now, once again, waiting for BouT 3 ...

Just like the first game, the production values in this series are off the charts. The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is amazing and the music is wonderful. The writing is also top notch and includes a lot of humor directed at and references to the video game, movie, and television genres. It also makes fun of things in the real world. I literally found myself laughing out loud at times. As other people have said, you are not playing the exact same characters as the first game. The gnome and the elf do not fit into the story line of this game so you only get to play the human Nate and Critter. (I won't dock any points for that, but I too fell in love with the gnome and his voice from the first game. He is missed.) Now for the bad. I consider myself fairly experienced in the adventure genre, and I found the inventory puzzles extremely tedious. There were many times when I just started trying to combine everything in my inventory to see if anything would combine and if that would give me a hint as to what to do next. Two times I gave up and looked at a walkthru (shh) to see what I should do next. And the combinations sometimes made no sense. It just seemed like a lot of the game was clicking around and doing things because they could be done, but not having any idea why your character was doing them. Personally, I find that more annoying than fun. (And this was not really an issue with the first game, which is why I gave the first game a full 5 stars.) So, overall, I would have given it 3 stars because of the puzzles which really detracted from the fun for me. And if the game didn't look and sound as good as it does it would have stayed there, but the games in this series are just so well done, and written so well, and so funny, I bumped it back up to a 4.

Critter Chronicles looks good, plays well, and is quite funny in places. But it feels weirdly tacked on between the first and second chapters of the series, and more than a bit uninspired in at least two chapters. Things really pick up in the fourth chapter in the tower of wizardry, with well thought-out and original puzzles and an actually magical setting, as opposed to the drab sci-fi-lite hybrid you have to go through to get there. Much like in BOUT, there is the annoyance of having to wait for the characters to figuratively hide in a corner when you switch them (it's much more convenient to double-click an exit and then click the other character's portrait), and idle animations are always played to completion, even when you've told the character to perform an action. Other than that, nothing to report on the technical side, which is good, considering the game-breaking bugs in the other two chapters of this series. You'll get some 8 leisurely played hours out of this, and probably enjoy the ride along the expressive and charismatic characters, but it't one one to get at full price, definitely.

I love BoUT more than most adventures I've played (and that's my favourite genre) and this one is okay. It's not essential to play it (missing Ivo and Wilbur), and I'd very much rather have a third part to complete the overall story, but I don't regret playing it. The Wizard's Tower is definitely the highlight of the game.

This series is incredible and I can't wait for the next game, but this one definitely wasn't as good. The main issue I had was with the inventory puzzles. The "classic" puzzles were actually quite good (but seldom), while the puzzles that involved your inventory were...not. Many of the solutions were completely obscure with no hints given through dialogue or otherwise. Even on hard difficulty there should be, at the very least, a semblance of a general outline of an idea of what you should be doing. The game is as beautiful as the first. I've been playing adventure games for a long time, but this series definitely provides some of the most memorable eye candy in the genre.