When games try to be funny, it’s often either an unquestionable success or a tasteless bore. Thankfully, the point-and-click adventure genre is a well-traveled road when it comes to humor. The number of incorrect paths and red herrings inherent to the genre lead to many opportunities for writers to practice their wit, without having to remain in line with an ongoing story. Book of Unwritten Tales 2 continues the first game’s ability to capture this perfectly.
Unwritten Tales 2 plays like an old LucasArts title, though it has more modern conveniences and is a lot more intuitive. As the first game did conclude with a fairly open ending, it’s good that this one got past Kickstarter; it felt a bit worrying for such a niche title to be left waiting for an obvious sequel when there was no solid expectation that it would be made.
The game returns to a similar format, in which you navigate through puzzles and areas with several different characters. As with the first game, the characters are very well-written, and even side characters get a good amount of development. Also reminiscent of the first game are the similarly styled and pre-rendered backdrops. It kind of makes me sad that this style has been replaced by fully-modeled environments in modern games, because they can be quite breathtaking with modern hardware and fewer space constraints thanks to digital distribution. One of the things that really makes the game work is the number of characters. Because you have multiple protagonists and so many side characters, I never really felt tired of their personalities as the game went on, a frequent problem in many old adventure titles.
The point-and-click format is a lot older than what you see in Telltale’s games, though it’s probably familiar to anyone who grew up with LucasArts and Sierra. As with the first Unwritten Tales, you can end up just mashing items together to see what works through trial and error, or simply wandering until you speak to the right person. Thankfully, though, the game is much more intuitive, leading to fewer cases where this is necessary. That said, it’s better to deal with some of these old problems than try to weed them out at the risk of losing what made those games so memorable. After all, trial and error is one way humor can be introduced so easily.
If you’re a fan of old adventure games and are looking for a new game with a lot of the old mechanics and style intact, you’d do well to check out Book of Unwritten Tales 2. It does what it can to provide a modern-era take on the genre while maintaining that classic feel.
Pros: Characterization is still wonderful, lots of good humor
Cons: Trial-and-error puzzle solving, blind exploration when confused
