Ratpick

A strategy game with an amazing amount of depth and personality and great potential for emergent narrative. While the game may be intimidating for newbies who aren't used to the genre due to its vast amount of options and choices, once one learns the basic mechanics of the game it lends itself to hours upon hours of great gameplay. One of the best strategy sandbox titles I've played in ages.

As a long-time fan of point-and-click adventure games and fantasy role-playing games, I was eager to try out a game that mixed two of my favourite genres. However, I was sorely dissapointed. The game isn't exactly terrible, but it's just hopelessly mediocre. On the technical side, the game is simply gorgeous, but while the graphics of the game are good, a number of silly glitches and inconsistencies break any sense of immersion in the game (such as at the very beginning of the game where you see a gremlin writing in a book, the entire page visibly filled with text and the gremlin simply moving his quill left and right). However, on the whole the game's audiovisual style is very charming, even though some of the voice-acting is mediocre at best and the game's female lead takes the cake for being the most improperly dressed fantasy heroine for a long time. Furthermore, in addition to the sad portrayal of the game's female lead, the game features at least one bit character whose entire purpose in the game seems to be to serve as a platform for laughing at dainty men. While I wouldn't go as far as saying that the game's writers are homophobic, the said character seems to serve no other purpose than to be a target for jokes poking fun at his lack of traditional heterosexuality. Furthermore, the game suffers from very lackluster writing. One might be willing to forgive the game for its cliched plot, seeing as it's supposed to be a parody of fantasy cliches, but at the same time the game seems so earnest with its plot that it's hard to tell what is exactly being parodied. Most of the characters are flat and lacking in any real characterization, and for anyone whose read any Terry Pratchett the characters will seem like cheap imitations of his wonderful dramatis personae. This is further compounded by the fact that the game's cast is extremely small, a fact that the game takes great delight in pointing out. Furthermore, the game's world seems very empty and small, and I feel that the fantasy genre would've lent itself more easily to a more open-ended format in the style of Monkey Island 2 and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Now the game progresses very linearly, without so much as a hint of exploration. It is also clear as day from the game's script that it is a translation of an originally German script: while there aren't any mistranslations per se, a lot of the dialogue doesn't sit well with the characters and doesn't seem very idiomatic. In addition to this, the subtitles are littered with the occasional misspelling and sometimes the transcriptions of spoken text to subtitle are completely off. Related to the above point about the game being a very shallow parody, while the game obviously tries to be funny, for me it didn't lend itself to more than a few chuckles. Most of the jokes and gags seem to have been recycled from somewhere else and I noticed a few obvious nods towards gags from Lucasarts' classic adventure games, where the same jokes were better executed in spite of the technical limitations of the time. With all that said, I guess I could recommend this game to you if you really enjoy point-and-click adventure games, but at the same time I feel that even with the lack of all that many new releases you could do a lot better. I do hope that the game's creators do keep at it, because the game does demonstrate great potential. Were the developers capable of making as beautiful a game as this with less of a linear story and more room for exploration, as well as a larger cast of characters and better writing, it would be a pleasure to play. As it stands, The Book of Unwritten Tales is nothing more than an ultimately disappointing little romp in the world of shallowly parodied and tired fantasy cliches that doesn't seem to be able to decide whether it wants to be taken seriously or not.