I got fooled into buying this game. The visuals (especially the black and white stills) hint at a very interesting RPG. Visually, the game looks like one of those "Choose your own adventure" books and there are plenty of great reviews on GOG. Unfortunately, all that is just the surface - the game itself is pretty bad. The visuals do look nice but they get old and hard on the eyes quickly. They also don't work very well, a lot of detail is hard to see because shading is minimal and some shapes just blend into the background. Damage during fights is impossible to see - the text is red on black and disappears very quickly. Dialogue text and descriptions are written in a strange font - hard to pinpoint why, but I found it tiring to read. (I read a lot otherwise and I don't mind text in games.) Because of the size of the font, only a few lines of text fit in the window so some conversations take a lot of clicking through. The few minutes that I played were nothing but a little exploration of a few rooms (very minimal interaction in each) and a bunch of boring but annoying fights (music, see below). The game feels grindy even after a short while. The menus are annoying - they have a little lag to them that's long enough to be just annoying. It feels like the game is sluggish when it's probably not (?). I'm not sure if there's a story - there's a short intro but I only played for about 10 minutes and then I had to give up. The music is atrociously bad and - as several other reviews pointed out - it's not possible to control audio volume. After a few minutes it just became unbearable - the same single (short) noise loop repeating over and over and over and over again. Why would a medieval RPG have generic techno elevator music is beyond me but that's what you have to listen to. I don't recall other sounds but the music is so loud that I may have missed them. Annoying and not fun are the best words to describe this game.
Fantastic prequel to the Book of Unwritten Tales. While the original games were even better, this part of the series is a worthy addition - high-quality, beautiful visuals, interesting and funny characters, well-written, thought-out story and great music all come together to make an excellent game. There's a bit of unneeded filler, as other reviews have pointed out (some walking that could've been left out, etc.) but at the end I think it didn't take much away from the fun. Highly recommended and I hope the developers continue making games with the characters they introduced in this series. If they manage to keep the story quality high, I'd buy any number of adventure games from them.
Witty, funny game with a well-written story, great voice acting and music and a good interface. Highly recommended if you're an adventure game fan.
