Point and click adventure games are back! Series like The Walking Dead have found creative ways to modernize the genre and PC gaming has been celebrating a massive resurgence in the last couple years. The move away from AAA releases and towards smaller indie titles has only helped shape the market perfectly for this once glorious genre. The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 looks to step right in and take advantage, available right now on Steam Early Access.
I never played the original Book of Unwritten Tales (BoUT), but I’d seen clips from it before and was definitely intrigued, so playing BoUT2 was an exciting proposition. Currently you can play just the first chapter, but that’s plenty for now. According to Steam I put over 5 hours into just that first chapter. That’s probably a little off, but there is definitely plenty of material to enjoy. Much more important to note is how polished the existing content is.
When a game is in early access you can never really know how polished it is or how much is still missing. Some games get the entire basic game out there and then add features and mechanics as the early access stages go on. Book of Unwritten Tales 2 went another route. They are releasing the game in chapters, so the whole base game isn’t there yet. The parts that are available, however, feel complete and extremely well polished. During my play time I could easily have forgotten I was playing an Early Access game and not a full product. The voice acting is solid, the visuals are great, and the puzzles feel well fleshed out and complete.
Don’t get me wrong, things aren’t perfect. BoUT2 is supposed to have controller support, which I would have loved, but it doesn’t work properly. The devs are aware of many of the issues with controller input and fixes are incoming, but for now you’ll be bound to keyboard and mouse. Apparently some users have run into dead ends in the puzzles as well that the developers have acknowledged. Luckily I had no such issues, but saving regularly just in case you hit a roadblock might be a good idea.
It could be difficult to identify a road-block, though, because some of the puzzles are pretty hard. As with most puzzle games it will vary from user to user, but I found myself in more than one situation where I really didn’t know what to do next. My advice in these situations is to get a fresh set of eyes on the situation. Every time I got stuck I had my wife look at it. She solved the problem and got me back on track within 5 minutes. Some things need to be interacted with more than once to have different outcomes, and a fresh perspective comes in without the bias of knowing what you’ve already tried.
The puzzles are hard, but fair. Whether it be item descriptions or subtle phrasing in dialogue, there is always a clue that points you towards the solution. There aren’t really any “Red Herring” puzzles where the solution is completely arbitrary and impossible to guess, other than the puzzle that is solved by fishing up a literal Red Herring. It’s a nice subtle nod to the predecessors of the genre, and it fits in well with the dozens of other references to everything from Portal and Final Fantasy to Skyrim and World of Warcraft.
If nothing else, the most telling endorsement I can make of Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is this: I was really bummed when the first chapter ended, and I have since bought the original Book of Unwritten Tales Collection so I can experience the whole story. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and I can’t wait until we get more of it, but it’s totally worth the money with the content available right now.