Go! Go! GOTY! '15 ~Day One~ (The Book of Unwritten Tales 2)

Day One

• Game: The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (King Art Games).
• Release Month: February.
• Source: The Steam Explorer Sale (still going! Ends Dec 1st!).
• Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex.)
• Started: 28/11.

Welcome to a fresh new series of Go! Go! GOTY! I took the liberty of already preparing an introduction to this feature for newcomers: the link is at the bottom of this entry and is also where you'll find links to every subsequent update to follow. Here's hoping I play enough games for a moderately-packed GOTY awards blog this time around, albeit one that's going to look mighty odd without any AAA games on it (besides Super Mario Maker (spoilers?)).

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is the first on the Go! Go! GOTY chopping block this time around, partly because half of this list is adventure games (hey, I like adventure games) and partly because TheBUTT was - wait, really? OK, sure - TheBUTT was one of my most highly anticipated releases going into 2015. I adored the first The Book of Unwritten Tales, though I didn't get around to the Critter Chronicles spin-off game to my chagrin. TheBUTT came out in February of this year, so it's likely a lot of folk will have forgotten about it by now, if they played it at all. Adventure games appear to have settled snugly back in their niche again, supplanted by these new "walking simulators", hidden object games and those that switch out the inventory mashing with more contemporary Manga-esque brainteasers as per a Layton or a Puzzle Agent. Still, between TheBUTT and Technobabylon and Life is Strange and the seventeen discrete licensed series Telltale put out this year, I anticipate this genre will get recognition in some "Best Story" award categories at the very least. (Counting on you for some adventure game GOTY mentions, @vinny, though I realize the fight for a list spot is a doomed one.)

The game itself, then. Any neophytes joining us will probably recognize from the screenshots that this is the usual fantasy adventure: dragons, magic, elf princesses, that whole biz. What TheBUTT and its predecessor TheBUTO does different is laugh at it. It's self-referential and self-deprecating in very much the same way as its most clear inspirations: the Simon the Sorcerer games, and to an equal extent the Discworld games. Equal parts satirical, spoofy and dedicated to sharp jokes and writing in spite of the genre fare, TheBUTT continues the tradition of being fairly amusing and a treat for anyone familiar with the genre conventions - and video game conventions, for that matter - that it's parodying. An example of this is when I was required to fish for an ingredient for a potion, only to have the character opine that she had zero experience fishing. Yet, arbitrarily, just trying it once gave her more insight into the sport of angling and, dutifully, the game informed you that you'd gone up one level in fishing expertise. The player could then keep fishing, watching this level counter go up one per time, or go talk to another character to instantly jump to level 15 after being informed that using bait is usually a good idea. They had a similar joke in the first game, where a character had to reforge a quest-important sword on an anvil but needed to practice by creating a hundred useless copper pots for the necessary blacksmithing experience, which the game mercifully skips past. That joke was more specifically aimed at Skyrim, but TheBUTT liked it enough to bring it back.

Even if you're not a fan of referential humor, though the game's subtle enough about it to not manatee-joke its way through every scenario, it still looks incredible and is filled with all the modern conveniences you'd want out of an adventure game. Interacting with hotspots is as easy as clicking on one to look at it and then having that command change to something more context-appropriate, like a spanner icon for something you can interact with or a grab icon for an item you can pick up. Every hotspot on the screen can be made visible by holding the space bar down, and hotspots will vanish once they no longer have anything to offer you in terms of interaction or observational quips. If a hotspot still lingers after you've interacted with it a few times, that means it's still necessary for a puzzle. You might raise the point that this renders the game too easy, but I've still hit a few roadblocks with some of the game's earliest puzzles so I'd say the puzzle difficulty is as strong as it needs to be while still cutting through a lot of the trial and error BS that can make or break a game from this genre. The voice-acting's great, mostly, and in spite of a few typos here and there (the game's German in origin, so I give it some leeway here) the writing's equally good, whether it's being goofy, or sarcastic, or (rarely) serious.

Anyway, in terms of progress I'm just about where the Quick Look left off, in Wilbur's first chapter of the game. I don't intend to get too deep into what's happening story-wise for the sake of spoilers, so I'll save the summary of the early parts of the game and what the protagonists have been up to for tomorrow's update. Until then, I hope your own attempts to cram in some last minute possible-GOTY entries goes equally smoothly this month.

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