The Book of Unwritten Tales

It’s hard to work out how I really feel about adventure games these days. Do I want them to be like they were in the good old days? Should they be a bit easier, with less obscure puzzles? Should the graphics be super modern, retro or stylised? Should the stories be grown up, urban whodunits or or cosy, fantasy romps? It seems no matter which of these I get, I immediately lament that it isn’t the other. Whether I’m playing an excellent modern adventure such as Machinarium, Grey Matter or one of Telltale Games episodic franchises I’m never quite back in that special place that classic LucasArts games enveloped me in. Maybe it’s me that’s changed. Maybe we all have. The Book of Unwritten Tales tries very hard to hug you just the way you want and has come the closest to succeeding any adventure has in years. That doesn’t mean it succeeds but nearly, so nearly.

It’s a high fantasy adventure entrenched in an RPG style world, filled with gnomes, elves, wizards, potions, ramshackle cottages and enchanted… stuff. It’s very much a parody, though, of every game, book and film set in this kind of world. You’ll be carrying about the One Ring while making not even slightly veiled jokes about Monkey Island and Magic the Gathering as well as poking fun at the waste of time playing online RPGs is. This would all be fine except every joke is telegraphed to you in a “See what we did there?” kind of way that gets old very quickly. Yes, we’ve all seen Lord of the Rings and we know who Guybrush Threepwood is. The characters have good timing and great voices though which goes someway to softening the wearing humour.

You play as four different characters and at points can even switch between them, sharing items and solving different parts of puzzles. It makes for an interesting extra facet to straight up point and click puzzling. The puzzles, though, are a little on the simple side, which is maybe for the best since there is no hint system at all. The actual puzzle architecture is also a little too repetitive, following a “distract NCP to pick up item” structure a little too often.

The game looks astonishingly good. The graphics are incredible with beautiful painted backdrops, amazing textures and smooth realistic animations both for characters and environmental flavour. It’s almost too good. Can I really be complaining about these graphics? Well, yeah, sort of. They almost seems unnecessarily fancy. They seem a little incongruous to the fantasy world which lends itself so well to the cartoon painted realms of classic adventures like Monkey Island 2 and Discworld. However with 60 incredibly detailed locations it’s hard not to be impressed. It’s this reluctance to relax and enjoy the opulence of the graphics and the generosity of the references that makes me wonder if adventure games are now in an unwinnable position of never being able to fulfil our requirements.  These boil down to expecting to be transported 20 years back through time and being given back our freedom from responsibilities and the patience and wide-eyed wonder of our youth. No game can do this and understandably adventure games have mostly stopped trying to but The Book of Unwritten Tales is giving it one more go and it’s a valiant attempt, that’s very much worth your time. If you’re an old cynic like me it can end up serving  as reminder that you can’t go back but despite that, this remains the single best way to relive the good old days you’re going to find in a modern era of console shooters and complex RPGs.