Book of Unwritten Tales

[Erkki]

I pre-ordered this after playing the demo. Again, found via RPS, and here's their WIT .

Unfortunately, it's downloading at mind-numbingly slow pace. In several hours, 200MB out of 3.5 GB. I'm thinking of getting one of those download managers (used to have GetRight back in the day)... are they still useful? I thought browsers had the same resume functionality these days, but firefox doesn't manage to do it with this download (maybe the server sucks).

[MrHoatzin]

I'm interested in your binary review ( / ). I wanna know if what annoyed RPS really takes away from the game enough to sour the experience.

[Erkki]

I'm interested in your binary review ( / ). I wanna know if what annoyed RPS really takes away from the game enough to sour the experience.

Did you try the demo? I saw an occasional bad translation there. But I guess that part didn't get to all of their annoyances yet. Demo gets from me.

I found they had changed the download link, now downloading at normal speed and hopefully will get to play the full game tomorrow.

[syntheticgerbil]

I saw this was getting a lot of buzz last year, but everyone looks so ugly that I just don't want to touch it. I feel like I've seen it all in the adventure world, so the only thing bringing me back is good art direction, story, or characters. This is a translated thing probably will low budget dubbers, I'm guessing? The biggest drawback to Whispered World was just the awful acting.

Maybe there's something redeeming?

[Erkki]

Finished it. Took me the whole weekend. It is good, but it is a bit lazy and shoddy. Everything the RPS Wot I Think said was right, except final moments being in German. They probably played a pre-release build. The only thing that was really off was the rolling credits, which indeed were partially in German, otherwise there were just a few badly translated words or sentences here and there. And the voice acting wasn't bad, but then I'm usually forgiving about voice acting.

The missing elements they talked about are probably whole sequences of the story that are left out and explained in a few off-hand comments or even only implied. It isn't clear whether this is intentional or if they lacked development budget. Still, that doesn't really make it a bad game, it has many flaws but was enjoyable.

The game is relatively lengthy by today's standards. At one point it seemed to be drawing near finish, but turned out that was only half-way or 2/3 through. But then the real ending seemed too come too abruptly, though. The final sequence really sucked. I would have expected at least some more puzzles, but it was just clicking on a couple of hot spots basically.

I didn't like how the game was structured with regards of which characters you control. It seemed quite random: at one time you have 3 characters, then for a really long time you only control the annoying guy (who becomes slightly less annoying as time goes by though), then 2 characters for a short time etc. It might also be due to lack of budget/time, maybe they had more planned.

Puzzles were mostly logical. Nothing too difficult, maybe on the same level as Sam & Max. There were several pixel hunting instances though, and it didn't help that they were at a place/time where you have A LOT of places open to you. Occasionally, there's also just a lot of stuff you can pick up and even partially solve some puzzles before you figure out why you need to. 3 of the pixel hunting instances made me peek into a walkthrough. And for some stupid reason, there's a short rhythm game puzzle.

The game on the whole still gets a from me though, but you might want to wait for possible Christmas sales (don't know how likely that is). It was good to have a full length adventure game to play after a while.

[Erkki]

This is a translated thing probably will low budget dubbers, I'm guessing?

Try the demo. I can't say as I'm not very picky about voice acting.

[toblix]

Just started this last night. What the hell is this lady wearing?!

[Erkki]

So I'm playing the sequel now (Critter Chronicles) and am somewhat disappointed. It has some of the original's charm, but the puzzles are so dumb up to the point where I'm at. Most of the time, I solved parts of puzzles before I had any reason to solve them. As a rule, you seem to get the items you need before you need them.

 

One puzzle can be solved only after you've examined an item in the inventory (had to look this up in walkthrough), while most of the time there is no reason to do that at all. In a few cases, you need to do the same thing repeatedly before it leads to a successful outcome, proving to the game that you are insane (according to the "definition of insanity").

 

The number of combinations you have available is limited most of the time, because hotspots that don't prove to be relevant usually disappear after a few examinations (sometimes one, sometimes a couple, sometimes 3, sometimes more it seems) -- it's as if the design foresees that "combine everything" is a more successful strategy than thinking and thus eliminated extraneous choices to combine.