The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles
I kinda let the Mario Party Party 6 stream sneak up on me today, so I unfortunately did not get too far into this prequel in the wonderful The Book of Unwritten Tales series of adventure games. The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles nominally appears to be focus on Critter, which I'm less enthused about, but after crawling as deep into the TheBUTT as I was allowed to go last year I'm anxious to climb back in there and do some more poking around. "There" being Aventasia, of course, the fictional yet somehow familiar fantasy world that Captain Nate Bonnett, Princess Ivo, Wilbur Weathervane and Critter inhabit and also the ever-flexible setting for these games and all their silly references and meta commentary on video gaming and fantasy fiction. It's a weird "out of time" thing; the effectiveness of the game's spoofing perhaps would've been greater when there were more generic adventure games around to poke fun at, but it casts its parody nets wide enough to snag enough references to gaming, fantasy and pop culture in general. It's never to the point of overbearing though, and rarely delves deep into meme humor like so many other games of a spoof-y bent with fewer jokes of their own.
Critter Chronicles appears to reduce the playable cast to just two: Nate the cowardly human rogue and his faithful, dimwitted partner and possible extraterrestrial visitor "Critter", and the game sets up how the two met and became partners in crime before the events of the first The Book of Unwritten Tales. While I enjoy Nate's chapters in the core games, he works best in an ensemble cast because of the way he bounces off the noble but naive gnome Wilbur and the far too wily elf Ivo, but beyond that are the complications with having a character seemingly based on an even less heroic Guybrush Threepwood, and far closer to the equally callow Simon the Sorcerer - which is perhaps the one adventure game series that Unwritten Tales owes the biggest debt to, given they share a similar premise and a predilection for meta humor, not to mention Simon's success in King Art Games's native Germany. Having him be effectively the only talking main character doesn't help to smooth over the inevitable comparisons that genre fans would be quick to draw.
Critter, of course, is an even worse character; not only do his bizarre physical traits make him something of a wild card when it comes to determining puzzle solutions - very hard to predict how he'll react to anything - but his lines are nothing but gobbledegook and the occasional word in English like "bokss" or "fatss". I think he was made to appeal to a younger audience, given that he looks like a purple muppet that makes funny noises, but I don't know if tykes are going to be the chief audience for a throwback game built to appeal to fans of a genre that hit its peak in the 1990s. Anyone old enough to have a PC gaming preference back then tends to be old as shit now. But hey, I'm sure someone said something similar about the Star Wars prequels and Jar-Jar still happened regardless. Indiscernible pratfall aliens who keep putting things in their mouth are here to stay, it would seem.
Despite the misguided idea to focus on the two least interesting characters, the game still has what counts for the series: it has a great script filled with dialogue laced with sarcasm and deprecating humor, the inventory puzzles are still reasonably rational enough to figure out and the game still has its ingenious hotspot system that eliminates those objects in the background that offer nothing more than a few quips in order to ensure that you never have too many moving parts to worry about when you get stuck. It also looks great and has a heroic score that juxtaposes well with the comedic incompetence of the "heroes". I can't wait to get back into it tomorrow, though I may just going to have to grit my teeth through the Critter-centric parts...
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