I'll be honest, I stopped about half-way into the second level, so take this comment (I won't insult anyone by calling it a full review) with as many grains of salt as you wish. But here's the reason I stopped playing so quickly: Take away the cute design and the sister-changing mechanice, the actual gameplay is extremely slow-paced and feels uninspired from the get-go. The reason for this is simple: The main goal of a level is to collect all the gems the level has. Now, I most certainly like collecting in games... as a side project, and with a reasonable amount of collecting per level. A reasonable amount would be one to three big things that may give bonus levels or whatever, and small things that may give one-ups or lets you buy stuff; and that's it. When it becomes the main project to collect 378 gems in one single level, it means that each level is progressed with a snail's pace, because you want to absolutely make sure you didn't miss anything in every section. And if you don't feel like doing this and decide to just finish the level, you'll find that at least half of the challenge of the game will disappear in a blink. Platform games of this type just can't afford to be that slow, especially not when the one and a half levels I tried were really uninspired. Oh, and the noises the sisters make when they jump and attack are horribly annoying, and grates on my brain even now.
Well, to be fair, it's also a few other things where this game fell a bit flat compared to the first game in this series... But one of the things that made the first Unwritten Tale so great was the gnome with the German accent! I loved him. All video game gnomes should hereby have German accents! (I speak of actual German accents, mind you, not the stereotypical "accent" that American actors adopt when they're playing Nazis). Apart from missing gnomes with Germans accents - WHY ISN'T HE IN THE GAME?!?!?! - the game also suffers from a couple of other issues. Like the original, any puzzles that's not about using things on other things are too few and far between. -Unlike- the first game, it's re-using the same area rather too much. And this area is a rather boring one, being mostly made out of ice. Finally, much of the game is played with a character that doesn't speak intelligibly. I guess this was an attempt to obscure the puzzles by not having the character give hints on what one can do with each item... But what it mainly achieved was that I ended up doing more tedious trial-and-error style of gameplay. All things considered, this ends up a perfectly average and adequate game in the point-and-click genre. But this is also a bit disappointing because there's a game in the series that already did things quite a bit better. Oh, and where's that gnome?!?!?!
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!
This game is absolutely nothing one haven't seen before, and I think it's been done better in just about all of them, including quite a few games back in the 90s. Most of the opening is basically an incredibly bland character that's just talking and talking and talking. Bad way of starting a game; people will want to play a game, or at least see some properly mood-setting scenes. To add insult to injury, the guy's starting off by saying "I'll just cut to the chase" before doing the exact opposite of that. After that bit, we finally get an actual cut-scene that turns out to be the start of a kind of story that isn't even trying to be the least bit original. The funniest moment would be the fact that the oh-so-overused Damsel in Distress - after having being told to trust absolutely no-one - conveniently spills everything to a complete stranger that just ran over her with a car. And then, finally, the gameplay. The game is of course about "use things" and "use things on other things". Is it really too much to ask for some actual puzzles thrown in for the sake of variety? Oh, and also there's pixel-hunting; a gameplay staple I honestly thought we'd seen the last of once the 21st century got into gear. I guess that since they were throwing in all the other clichés, they'd be cruel to leave that one out.
As others have mentioned, this is not much of a game. It is instead an interactive story... But it's a different story, and it will gently move you a lot; like a butterfly punching you in the gut. The design, the story, and particularly the music will help achieve something you don't see every day. True, I cannot guarantee you will like it - people's tastes are different and all - but I will recommend that you at least try it.
Now, I will admit, it feels like the slowness of the game is deliberate, both to give it a more relaxed atmosphere (and the atmosphere is really good) as well as it probably being the only way to make some of the mechanics workable. But even so, the gameplay just ended up being boring to me. I've played tons of platformers with the same awkward jumping, same sluggish controls, and by now, I require something really, really, -really- special to want to go through what is mostly an outdated way of doing platform mechanics, mechanics that doesn't get better from there being somewhat too far between the checkpoint.
The game itself had promise. I liked the aesthetics, the story seemed fine, there was a reasonable amount of exploration, the photograph sidequest just the right amount of distracting. Voice acting better than average, sound effects and music perfectly OK. But there were one half-major and one fully major issue. The half-major issue was that no matter how much I tried tweaking the graphical settings, there would constantly be glitches in the menu screen. I have no idea what I should do to fix it, and I'm possibly "spoiled" by console gaming, but I'm not one of those people that enjoys having to spend about 30% of my gametime trying to make things stop flickering in and out of graphical existence. And then there's the fact that this game most definitely was made for a console. The PC controls are awkward, and I was longing for a gamepad. Then I suddenly realised that my X360 controller will most likely be able to be plugged into my modern computer and be playable with. Well, the first part was true, and I got it hooked up and the necessary software updates done, and I was opening the options menu to configure... And the game doesn't support gamepads. At all. Yes, I am aware that it's possible to "fool" a computer into thinking your gamepad is like a keyboard, but seriously, I just grew sick of an otherwise good game not even trying to meet me halfway on this, and haven't played it since.
