The Book of Unwritten Tales

[JarlFrank]

Holy fuck this has to be probably the best adventure I've played in years. It has charme, good humour and that certain "something" that ties you to your chair and makes you play the game until you solved just one more puzzle. Granted, the puzzles are relatively easy, it's one of the few adventure games I could play through without using a walkthrough (except for some places where I got stuck because I missed an item), but it's great. Loved it. Great characters, lots of humorous references and the graphics are awesome, too.

http://www.book-of-unwritten-tales.de/

Yes, it's German only. Yes, they're making an English version but it's not out yet.
But damn, this was awesome. Probably the most charming adventure since Sierra and Lucas Arts stopped making them.

 

[VonVentrue]

I've been eager to play this game even before it shipped in Germany. Now that I've read a couple of glowing reviews, waiting for the international release is slowly becoming unbearable.
Technically, I could have bought it a long time ago, but I'd vastly prefer the English version. I can only hope that Black Mirror 2 and Gray Matter won't end up being equally delayed.

On a somewhat related note, you did purchase TBoUT in order to support the devs, didn't you, Frank?

 

[laffer35]

I've been watching this game for a while and it looks amazing. I'm very glad to hear the game is good, I'm just waiting for the English version to be released.
Hopefully they'll do a good job at dubbing it.

Maybe I'll get the German version as well as I'm trying to learn German as a hobby.

 

[thesheeep]

Yes, that game is awesome. It was the only adventure game I played through since... Monkey Island 3.

Other than that... what Jarl said.

And, also... I was looking for a good chance to post this, but since I don't want to wait any more:

 

[JarlFrank]

I've been eager to play this game even before it shipped in Germany. Now that I've read a couple of glowing reviews, waiting for the international release is slowly becoming unbearable.
Technically, I could have bought it a long time ago, but I'd vastly prefer the English version. I can only hope that Black Mirror 2 and Gray Matter won't end up being equally delayed.

On a somewhat related note, you did purchase TBoUT in order to support the devs, didn't you, Frank?

Yes I did. When games are as awesome as this, I buy them.

 

[laffer35]

I'll definitely buy this one when I can get the English version.

There are quite a few 'new' (later than 2000) adventure games I need to pick up... lots of those I haven't played.

 

[coldcrow]

Just started up this game... O.O Reminds me of a better time when I was a kid and the fairytales and imagination was more "alive".

I'll buy this. Even if it has flaws later on... this game has a soul.

 

[JarlFrank]

Just started up this game... O.O Reminds me of a better time when I was a kid and the fairytales and imagination was more "alive".

I'll buy this. Even if it has flaws later on... this game has a soul.

Except for too many WoW references for my taste (which are all funny, though), there aren't any real flaws later one. Some areas lagged for me, but otherwise it was consitently awesome. The humour only gets better toward the end. Can't wait for the next game... they've already announced a prequel that is a bit shorter and focuses on Nate and the Vieh.

 

[piydek]

Ok, at the moment i'm at the part where you play with Wilbur the gnome and i'm in the Seefels city, trying to brew a magic drink...so, not far into the game, but not the beginning either.

The complaint i have is that the game is just way too easy. The main reasons for that seem to be that you almost immediately use all the items you pick up, so there's not a lot of cross-referencing in the game over longer periods of time. The other thing that makes it too easy is the dynamic pointer that immediately shows whether to look, pick up, and even changes colour when it's possible to use something on something else.

Also, the puzzles are just very very easy and obvious. Another thing that makes it too easy is small number of locations that are relevant at a point in time. Up to this point it always comes down to about 3 locations to complete any part of the game. This makes the number of possible variables to solve something quite small.

So, they could have made it way harder and i'd certainly prefer manual action selection over a dynamic pointer. But even with these complaints, i find it a very fine game.

 

[Humanophage]

Sounds like a brilliant way to improve my German. That will be my first game entirely in German, albeit I played Gothic II with German audio and English subtitles. The lack of a real necessity to use original German products due to most of them being swiftly translated into English is one of the primary barriers that prevent me from mastering the language. Let's hope the game isn't overwhelmingly difficult in terms of vocabulary.

 

[piydek]

Sounds like a brilliant way to improve my German. That will be my first game entirely in German, albeit I played Gothic II with German audio and English subtitles. The lack of a real necessity to use original German products due to most of them being swiftly translated into English is one of the primary barriers that prevent me from mastering the language. Let's hope the game isn't overwhelmingly difficult in terms of vocabulary.

That's the same thing I'm doing . I'm in the process of learning the language and while my german is not so bad, it's far from good. At first, the dialogues were a bit too speedy for me as i need a bit of time to catch everything in more complicated sentences and speed of text was calibrated to the speed of spoken/recorded speech (it was cool in older adventure games where there was no recorded speech how you could set up duration of text staying on-screen. There's no such thing here, of course). But i adapted to the speed of speech pretty soon.

It's better when there's no subtitles in language one already knows...it's good to force oneself to function strictly within the language that's being learned even if one doesn't understand everything.

 

[kendricktamis]

Sounds like a brilliant way to improve my German. That will be my first game entirely in German. albeit I played Gothic II with German audio and English subtitles. The lack of a real necessity to use original German products due to most of them being swiftly translated into English is one of the primary barriers that prevent me from mastering the language. Let's hope the game isn't overwhelmingly difficult in terms of vocabulary.

I have been playing such kind of games in different languages and these games helpful to improve my vocabulary. First of all i have recorded a Dialogue then try to hear approximately 10 times and ask to my sir and finally i translate into language convert software.

 

[Jim Cojones]

I have found an unofficial translation but it's barely serviceable.

 

[Stabwound]

Go babelfish.

Yeah, that's terrible, although it looks like everything is in XML files and easily translatable. The only problem is that it's a ridiculous amount of text for someone to have to translate.

The official English release of the game was cancelled, by the way.

 

[trustno1code]

The official English release of the game was cancelled, by the way.

Wha wha wha? This calls for or something.

Fudge, just read that the German distributor tanked, and TAC supposedly also isn't doing too well. Here's hoping someone with a lot of free time does a proper translation.

Or I could do what others here have and finally learn the bloody language...
Then again, I was supposed to learn Russian for Pathologic...

 

[Seolas]

This looks awesome, can't someone make a decent English translation? Has a look of Simon the Sorcerer to it but I can barely understand two words of German.

 

[Seolas]

My wish has come true!

http://www.bluesnews.com/s/113000/book- ... nted-plans

UNWRITTEN TALES in Winter 2010, saying this will be "THE adventure release of 2010," and that: "A big emphasis will be put on rendering homage to the great books and movies of the role game and fantasy genre. Therefore JoWooD will hire the best translators and Voice Actors so that the great quality of the animated dialogues is assured. More than 40 characters will wittily interact so that the gamer can solve more than 150 challenging riddles in more than 60 lovingly created settings."

 

[Jim Cojones]

Yay!

 

[Wulfstand]

Good news indeed. Now what about my Drakensang 2?

 

[Dagorath]

HOW CAN A SO FULLY LADEN DRAGON FLY AT ALL!!!1 D:

...I need to start yelling this at people on IRC when they use bad English.

 

[Jaesun]

My wish has come true!

http://www.bluesnews.com/s/113000/book- ... nted-plans

UNWRITTEN TALES in Winter 2010, saying this will be "THE adventure release of 2010," and that: "A big emphasis will be put on rendering homage to the great books and movies of the role game and fantasy genre. Therefore JoWooD will hire the best translators and Voice Actors so that the great quality of the animated dialogues is assured. More than 40 characters will wittily interact so that the gamer can solve more than 150 challenging riddles in more than 60 lovingly created settings."

fuck yeah! I really really want to play this.

 

[Eyeball]

Finished the English version of this. Didn't have high expectations, but it actually IS good. The graphics are lovely, the voice acting generally very good for a dubbed game, the characters endearing and the jokes are funny, although it does have a few MMO-related jokes which may or may not be your cup of tea.

It is also of a pretty decent length, although the end does leave itself way open to a sequel and is in general a bit too abrubt. I finished it in 10 hours, but I was rarely especially stumped.

Be warned though, that the game suffers from RAMPANT fanboyism. It has references to old Lucasarts games galore and steals several puzzles from MI and Indiana Jones games. I found this to be a bit irritating as there are simply so many of them, but overall I found it to be a very sweet, charming and enjoyable little game, well worth the 15 pounds or so I paid for it.

7.5/10, highly recommended for fans of Monkey Island, DOTT, Loom or other Lucasarts classics.

 

[kaizoku]

Necro time!

Was wondering if this was any good and I'm happy to hear it's codex approved.

As of today it's on sale on GOG!
Will buy it.

 

[Jaesun]

Yes. Well worth the price. DONT EXPECT TEH GREATEST ADVENTURE GEAME EVAR!!!!!!1111!!!

It is a very enjoyable well done Adventure game. Art was also fantastic. Some people had problems with the voice overs. I didn't I thought they were fine.

 

[Aeschylus]

It's quite good, and definitely worth the price they are asking for it. The puzzles are clever, the art very good, and the localization not terrible. The only downside I would point to is that the ending feels pretty rushed. It's certainly the best adventure game to come out of Germany.