Point-and-click games have been experiencing something of a resurgence in recent years, spearheaded by games such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead. The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, by German developer KING Art, however falls in-line with the point-and-clicks of old. It’s much more Monkey Island than it is The Wolf Among Us.

The game is set in the fantasy land of Aventasia, where we follow the exploits of four separate characters. There’s Ivo the elven princess, Wilbur the wizard gnome, Nate the pirate and Critter, Nate’s fuzzy companion. One of the game’s unique mechanics is that you rotate through each of these characters as the game unfolds, adding a lot a variety to an otherwise by the book point-and-click adventure.

I should mention also that the game looks absolutely gorgeous. The backgrounds have been beautifully drawn and are vibrant and sumptuous to look at, while the character models are of a much higher quality than one would expect from the genre. Some of the animations however can be a bit dodgy, for instance when a character has to spend a few seconds lining themselves up with the object they wish to inspect or pick up.

Beyond the visuals, the voice acting in TBoUT2 is, for the most part, excellent. It’s probably a personal thing but after a while the sound of Wilbur’s voice made me want to turn the sound off altogether. That’s not to say the acting was bad, but that I hate his voice! Small gripe, I know.

But, the most important aspect of any point-and-click adventure game is always going to be the puzzles. What you’re after are interesting puzzles that force you to think, but that are also fair. TBoUT2 does well in this regard, providing some fun and intricate puzzles that at times had me really scratching my head. But once I realised the solution I never felt like the game was treating me unfairly. My only complaint about the puzzles is that sometimes the next piece of the puzzle appears in a place you already ‘checked’, meaning you often need to recheck things to progress. To help with this, you can press the ‘spacebar’ which will highlight all the objects/areas of interest in the scene.

All this is to say that TBoUT2 is a high quality adventure game with enough interesting puzzles to keep you busy for many hours. However, for me there are a couple of things that stop the game being great and keep it at simply ‘good’.

As the game’s title suggests, this is a sequel, and it begins, as far as I can tell, from the very moment of the first game’s ending. There are frequent references to the first game throughout TBoUT2, but they are never explained. It doesn’t prevent you from playing, but it also doesn’t help you to understand the lore or the current situation in Aventasia. For instance, it appears that there was recently a war of some sort and that the people of Aventasia are still reeling from it. There is constant talk of riots and barricades in Seastone, but without the background information, it all seems rather pointless.

My other gripe with the game is a far bigger one as far as I’m concerned. There is a long and established history of referencing other games and media in video games. Sometimes this is done really well, like the first time I found Mario’s portrait hanging on the wall in Hyrule Castle. Another good example is in The Witcher 2 where you can stumble upon a dead assassin from the Assassin’s Creed games during  the prologue mission.

There is nothing clever about the way this is done in TBoUT2 however. During one ‘scene’ I counted 12 references to other IPs, ranging from the small (the rat character’s name is Remi as in the movie Ratatouille), the obvious (one of the characters uses Homer Simpson’s ‘Doh’ catchphrase) and all the way up to borderline copyright infringement (the school the gnome works at is The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and therein he comes across a book belonging to ‘the Half Blood Prince’ as well as a fireplace-based transportation network).

There is a difference between a cheeky nod of the head to other people’s work and what basically amounts to IP theft. It didn’t come off as parody to me either, it reeked of laziness to be honest. It felt like the developers had sat around a table and said, “right, make a list of everything that is good in other entertainment media and let’s put them in this game”. TBoUT2 has a character of it’s own and a decent story, so I don’t understand why they felt the need to rip-off so many other games/films/TV shows/books.

At the end of the day, it will probably come down to personal taste. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will find all these unsubtle references a delight, but there will be others like me who think that the developers should perhaps work harder on growing their own IP.

That issue aside, if you are a fan of point-and-click adventure games and yearn for a game in the style of the older classics, you can certainly do a lot worse than The Book of Unwritten Tales 2. It is beautifully made with an engaging story, well rounded characters and high quality puzzles. My only advice would be to perhaps play the first game before embarking on this one, and to take the unrelenting IP theft with a healthy spoonful of salt.

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