The Book of Unwritten Tales is a 3D point-and-click adventure game set in a fantasy world. The game consists of 5 fairly lengthy chapters, although the last chapter was very short compared to the others. The Steam page says the game has about 20 hours of gameplay, but it only took me about 11 hours.

The graphics are pre-rendered in 16:10 aspect ratio, which means that on other aspect ratios there will be black bars on the sides. I have a 16:9 monitor so there were a bit over 1 cm wide black bars on each side of the screen. Aside from that minor issue the graphics are good and the environment looks very detailed.

The story is good, although it's a pretty standard fantasy story. You must find a powerful artifact and not let the evil forces get it. The somewhat silly world and the charming characters make the story a lot better. For example there are 2 NPCs playing a fantasy RPG, in which they must fill tax forms and do other mundane real life tasks. The dialogue is also pretty funny and contains several nods to other games like the Monkey Island series.

I found the puzzles to be easy and simple. I never really had to look for any items as you could get almost all of them on the first time you entered that area. The interactable hotspots disappeared once you no longer needed them or if you had interacted with them for a couple of times. You also had to interact with everything once before you could pick it up, which I learned pretty quickly. That basically meant that all the hotspots remaining after going through them all would be used in a puzzle. The inventory system made everything even simpler as the game showed a text when you could combine two items.

The game is fully voice acted and I thought the voice acting was pretty good. The music wasn't that great, but it was often barely noticeable. There are subtitles available in the game, but they don't show during the few cutscenes the game has.

I thought the game was good and recommend playing it, if you like point-and-click games.

Another great point-and-click.

What's great about this game is that it's comedy gold. From the dialogue, the references, and the charming story, the game will just make your day even better.

The Book of Unwritten Tales is without doubt one of the greatest adventure games I have played :)
It is funny, has a nice difficulty with logical solutions to puzzles and it even has a great story :)
Combine all that with great voiceacting and epic music and you have a really nice game :)
Its a must play imo :)

This is not just the better point-and-click game i ever played, but one of the better gaming experiences i had so far. Awesome games like Machinarium are far, far away from The Book of Unwritten Tales. And the story... It's just amazing! It gets better and better while progressing. The final chapter is just... you must see it for yourself!

Point-and-click adventurers, RPGs and fantasy worlds lovers must have it! It is full of really funny references of a lot of known worlds like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings. Those who are familiarized with this kind of games will just stagger at the screen and probably will find themselves smiling alone while playing.

I wanted to see it on a movie, and although i can replay it, i'll miss the delight and freshness of discover it for the rest of my life.

What do you know: A proper, lengthy fantasy adventure that's actually quite good, although doesn't really reach greatness.

Perhaps it's because the game is stuck a bit too much in the past, with a metric ton of references to classic LucasArts adventures in conversations, situations and puzzles alike. I'm sure the designers meant some of the puzzles as homages to the originals, but they just seemed like swiped material to me. Also, you don't need to be breaking the fourth wall with a jokey pop culture reference every 15 minutes or so. I liked the game best when it was just doing its own thing, not when it was imitating others.

Maybe it's because the game does begin to falter in its latter half, with puzzles becoming more and more about just clicking everything in sight, locations getting reused and re-reused, and the narrative getting a bit muddled with constantly switching protagonists. I think a more focused approach with a couple of hours of fat trimmed from the gameplay might have worked better.

Anyhow, not a bad adventure game. Some of the scripting could use some work, but technically this was rather nice with polished graphics, unobtrusive music and a smooth interface. Doesn't trump Daedalic, the reigning German adventure-makers, but doesn't stray too far behind.