Day Two

• Game: The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (King Art Games).
• Release Month: February.
• Source: The Steam Explorer Sale (still going! Ends Dec 1st!).
• Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex.)
• Started: 28/11.

Yep, we're still here. Since I left off yesterday, I've made some considerable progress through the newest catastrophe to hit Adventasia (I didn't name it), though I have no idea how far through the game I actually am. The game generally doesn't follow a conventional three act structure, given its habit of regularly switching between its multiple protagonists. Wilbur's been doing most of the heavy-lifting, but I quite like the little dork so I don't mind.

I went over the game's mechanics last time, though there wasn't a whole lot to say given that the game deliberately sticks to genre mores so it can just as frequently subvert them. Lots of hotspot hunting, inventory investigating and dialogue tree dilemmas to suss out. The game makes all these aspects more palatable, as I discussed last time, so I've not hit too many brick walls so far. It respects the player's time, which is always a game design philosophy I encourage.

The intent was to dedicate most of this update to the game's central characters:

• Captain Nate Bennet, the roguish human... well, rogue, who has left behind his assertive, independent love interest - the Elven Princess Ivo - for reasons that are as yet unexplained, but I suspect it involves getting the wrong idea about trying to impress her with status and wealth when she's never cared about anything like that. The game's spent the least amount of time with him so far, dedicating half of his first real chapter to The Critter trying to outsmart an ape bartender.
• Ivo's more the standard subversive (yes, I realize that's an oxymoron) heroine who despairs of the restrictive role of a princess and once again escapes her Elven utopia to seek the solution to a delicate problem. Ivo's main strength and main weakness as a character is that she's a straight-woman in a land of idiots and eccentrics: by giving her a ridiculous problem to solve and a dominating mother to be neurotic about, she's rendered a bit more human (so to speak) and sympathetic here.
• Everyone's gnomey homie Wilbur Weathervane is, of course, still a wizard and is stuck teaching the next generation of mages despite knowing next to nothing about the craft.
• The Critter is still The Critter and the Chewbacca to Nate's Solo. It doesn't so much speak as emote in gobbledegook, stores items in its gullet and interacts with objects in a way most humans/humanoids would not. As with most comic relief characters I find a little of that guy goes a long way, though his antics do remind me of my beloved slapstick Gobliiins at times.

The game's story gets more complicated from there, continually jumping character perspectives as they frequently prevent disasters only to trigger even bigger ones, and suffice it to say it'd be too much to summarize to get to where I'm at in Chapter 4 even if I wanted to spoil the intermediate story beats for everyone, which I don't.

I'll say there's been an equal number of highlights and rough spots so far. Some incongruous reference and meta humor aside, the game still has a sharp wit behind its dialogue and puzzle design. One such puzzle involves currying the favor of the four creation gods, long-forgotten and now trapped in statues lost deep underground. They happen to be the God of Stories, the Goddess of Art, the God of Jokes and the God of Riddles: essentially, the four pillars that make up this game. Likewise, the NPCs are still fun to talk to - I met Vinny's favorite, the janitor troll - and the puzzles still strike the right balance of difficult to figure out without being too obtuse for the sake of artificially lengthening the game. However, there was one particular sequence where I had to literally trial-and-error the multi-step operation of a large steam-powered machine that threw me for a loop. It seemed like such a poorly designed puzzle that I almost wanted to check online afterwards to see if there was some hinted-at, preferred solution I was missing other than brute forcing it over and over: given Wilbur's "gnome advice" on the necessity of hitting buttons on big machines until they work, I suspect that brute force was the intentional path all along. Likewise, though the aforementioned Gods and the quests to gain their favor were intelligent for the most part, the riddles the Riddle God gave you were lifted right out of The Hobbit. I mean, I was playing a member of a diminutive fantasy race challenging someone who liked riddles in a dark cave, but I didn't expect the homage to be the entire puzzle. The fact that the God of Stories purposefully let me off with any old claptrap the dialogue tree could construct just because it wanted the game's story to continue almost made up for it.

There's also the bugs. There's a lot of weird yet commonly-occurring problems with dialogue interrupting or skipping and playable characters walking around endlessly in circles to find the right flag ("Wait... here? No, here. This spot is good for talking."). At some points the audio sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, and hotspots would occasionally remain after the item they pertained to had already been collected. There hasn't been anything game-breaking yet, nothing that would necessitate reloading an earlier save - the game also auto-saves, mercifully, so that means I won't have to worry about a Syberia repeat where the game went batshit nuts, crashed and I lost an hour of progress. Still, there's always the dread that one of these many minor glitches might upgrade itself to a major one. This sort of jank seems to follow every game made in Europe for whatever reason. This game is certainly ambitious, so it could well be that we Euros tend to overreach a lot.

We'll have one more update of TheBUTT tomorrow. Whether I finish the game or not, I'll have exhausted everything I have to say about it. Barring some awful anticlimax ending or one of those major glitches I was talking about, this is still a safe recommend for anyone who likes their throwback adventure games to be gorgeous, lengthy and perhaps a bit on the sly and satirical side.

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