Our guest review Elfa takes a look at a European classic
For somebody who loves quests and RPGs, to get his/her mitts on The Book of Unwritten Tales is like giving sweets to a kid. It is irresistible. The newest release from King Arts Games is made with a lot of humour and skill. If Tolkien, Star Wars, the Matrix and Terry Pratchett take pride of place on your book shelves then this is the game for you. Having been released in 2009 in Germany to much acclaim, it has finally reached our shores. Is it worth the wait?
The game is a quest/RPG based in a fantasy world full with dwarves, gnomes, elves, humans, dragons, genetic experiments and….. robots?
Your hero is not a single character throughout the game. You start as a wood elf that becomes inadvertently involved in a great quest to help end a long war. From there a little gnome becomes the unlikely hero that is also burdened with the great responsibility to deliver The One Ring to the Arch-Mage to help stop this war.
The hero may change but the game is just as great with either of them. The puzzles are sometimes straight forward but sometimes require some lateral thinking. The graphics are good, although there are some bugs in the beta version that I played but that is to be expected from a beta.
For me the dialogue was the best part of the game. The references to other books and films are hilarious. At one stage when our little gnome hero arrives in the human town just to find it almost completely deserted, he finds two humans in a tavern glued to a big machine playing a simulation game where they are in a “fantasy” world where there are only humans, who go to work, drive cars, get parking fines, borrow books from a library, fill in tax returns…. Sounds familiar? Yes, they play a game which is a simulation of our “fantasy” world. And they are just as addicted to it as we are to the games based on their reality. It was too funny for words really.
From what I played so far I thoroughly enjoyed the game and for anybody who loves quests and witty humour, this is one to look out for.
The Book of Unwritten Tales is out on October 29th, 2011