Original Book of Unwritten tales was a complete surprise – it was released at the time when it seemed that comedic adventure games were truly gone there was that game, looking good, voice acted good, with a restrained amount of pop references and very strong self identity and pretty good gameplay. Critter Chronicles, while not as good and clearly started as more of a short expansion made bigger for a full standalone release with pointless filler, was still a great game and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 manages to be both much better and kinda worse than the first two at the same time.
It still looks fantastic – even better now, voice acting is still great and a lot of humour and dialogue is still good. The sense of adventure is here, for the most part, and gameplay-wise around 70% of the game are very nicely done. However, closer to the middle the amount of “and now you have to do this” piling up on top of previously solved puzzles/issues in the absolutely same almost unchanged location in each of 5 Chapters started to get annoying. Chapter 3 introduced a lot of pointless back and forth and Chapter 4 was all about that – running around completely different locations, finding items in one place to solve puzzles in other places. And it was just a bit… too much. I’ll give KING art they’re due – they did try to make every new task more or less fresh and events rarely stalled for too long. But moments of “can we move on now?” happened more often than I would’ve liked and ending parts of the game were quite disappointing.
And the weakest part of this, by the end, was the storytelling. The game started very strong, but starting from the middle it just went “whatever”, despite introducing actually cool characters or moments from time to time. And ended in a very disappointing sequel setup, which made the entire game feel less of a TBoUT 2 and more like TBoUT 2. Part 1, where both previous games felt self-contained stories that can live without sequels. And pop culture humor is crossing the limits way more this time around. In the first games there were actual attempts at world building. Here the identity gets easily lost among all the “this is this game, this is this movie, this is this book” things that happen all the time – the entire closing chapter is one huge Halloween-themed reference party. And it doesn’t help that despite having 3 characters again it rarely feels like a proper 3-character story, like the first game did.
But I’m disappointed just because how much better many things were, just how much potential there was and still is and just how much I actually liked playing most of the game. Not all. Constructor “puzzle” needs to die in a fire. Ahem. But yeah – it’s still a good game, just… better served for those who already invested themselves in the series with the first game, but not as good of a sequel or a standalone game as it clearly had every chance to be.