The Book of Unwritten Tales 2

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is a Graphic Adventure game originally released in 2015 and ported to the Switch in 2019. Set in a fantasy world with some comedic elements, this game’s plot follows the heroes from the first game as they reunite to go on a new adventure.

For players who never touched the first game, the The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 quickly brushes up on the plot of the original title, and its characters are fairly standard archetypes that are pretty easy to understand right off the bat even if this is your first entry in the series. That’s not to say the story or writing here is bad, though – there’s some solid, clever writing, good characterizations, and a wealth of amusing references to other fantasy videogames, films, and TV shows.

The presentation here overall is very good, despite this being a game that’s a half a decade old. The characters and environments are nicely-detailed and mostly well-animated, with pretty good use of lighting. One exception I would point to is the characters’ mouths don’t match their voiced words, but otherwise this is a very polished game, visually. In addition, this game’s voice acting is spot-on, and even minor characters are excellently voiced with loads of personality. This is paired with fantasy-genre appropriate, though not especially memorable, music.

As for the gameplay, this is mostly pretty standard Graphic Adventure fare. Search the environment for things to inspect and items to add to your inventory, then use the appropriate items to complete your goal at the moment. The game does a good job of guiding new players through the motions during an early tutorial, and there’s even a button to highlight all interactive objects in an environment – and it even shows anything you can use an equipped item on. Overall this game is so fairly user-friendly that I would have been tempted to say this game fits my “family-friendly” descriptor that I give to games that are good for more casual players, except that a plot point early into the game has characters briefly touching on the topic of sex when a character is revealed to be pregnant, and I’d rather not have to deal with angry parents.

I do have a few complaints here, though. Firstly, the walking speed of characters is frustratingly slow. On top of that, when moving characters around, they have to take a moment to turn themselves whenever turning around, and when interacting with the environment they take a moment to shuffle over to a designated spot, which not only looks weird, but adds yet another delay to the game. The result of all of this is that this game can be pretty frustrating in the way that it’s constantly making you wait, either for a character to move where you want, or for them to shuffle into the appropriate position to interact with what you’re trying to get them to interact with. Even so much as turning to face an object to interact with is a small ordeal.

While it’s far from perfect, The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is well-written, well-voiced, and has a wonderful presentation and a decent sense of humor that makes it a solid pick for anyone who’s a fan of Graphic Adventure games. It’s not without its frustrations, but overall this is a fine entry in the genre.

tl;dr – The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is a Graphic Adventure that combines typical fantasy tropes with parody in a game that has an excellent presentation, good writing, good voice acting, and is overall a fine entry in the genre, even if moving around and selecting items in the game is a bit of a pain.

Grade: B

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