In one of the main arteries of peaceful Bremen , the cobbled Martinistrasse , in reddish stone buildings overlooking the Wesser River , is the headquarters of a small indie studio, King Art Games . Although its name does not attract attention like that, it is probably one of the most successful studios in Germany, with adventures like The Raven , or strategy games like
Battle Worlds: Kronos (which was part of the campaign for more success ever achieved with kickstarter in Germany).
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It is not always like that, but in life normally when you describe someone or something, and you use the word success or a synonym several times in a paragraph, it means that the mentee does things right; and in this case, very well.
The flagship of King Art , is undoubtedly the saga ” The Book of Unwritten Tales “, game that caused great commotion when it saw the light in Germany on 2009,
for being an adventure with the essence of the great. He had an average of 8’7 in his country of origin, and although it took more than two years to reach the rest of
Europe, he was acclaimed by critics in the same way. We would not exaggerate when saying that at the time it was a fresh, carefree adventure, which had you sitting by the PC for a lot of hours and distilling class in each of the scenarios and situations that we lived.
Five years have passed and the challenge was great. In between, they released The Critter Chronicles , a prequel that narrated the skills of one of the protagonists to make a mouth to this second installment. The question that we all ask ourselves is the point of the game, or we think of buying it: Is it better than the first one? The simple and direct answer is no;
but it is a great game , with so many good things that missing it would be a crime for most lovers of adventure. And when we say that it is not
better than the first is because we sincerely believe it, it is very close, but it does not surpass it. We will discuss their weak points, but they should not tarnish the virtues of this adventure, which are many.
When the game begins, in the palace of the princess elfin Ivodora you realize the magnitude and resources that have been used in it. Graphically it is spectacular . You wonder if it really is from an indie studio, because the colors, the definition,
the character design, the quality of the scenarios, the zooms that come and go to show us points of attention are made with such care and affection that it is hard to think that a small group of designers could have created something like that. However, make
no mistake, there are resources. Because producing something like that is not cheap, and it takes time, but it should be a message for other developers, even for important distributors.
A message that says that if you do things well, with care, and invest where you have to invest, adventures have an outlet . With a faithful audience that is not easy to cheat, they can become profitable, and this saga is the sample.
Technically, and it is obviously a truism, it is more polished than its predecessor, the animations for example are excellent . Sometimes a great product is formed in details that pass little noticed, that you do not give much importance but that added together make it valuable even if you do not know very well the reason. And TBUT 2 has an animation for absolutely everything.
If we open a drawer our character opens it; if we pick up a rat from the ground, a cable from the ceiling, we do magic or we try to read a book, all the animations are in accordance with it. And it would be difficult to find another adventure
that is so detailed in that, the normal thing is that a character stands next to a desk, the drawer opens alone and tells us what is inside. Here that never happens, it’s all so polished that something like that would be a crime and it shows. An example is when we have to introduce a small mouse through
a pipe to enter a bakery. Well, we see the mouse enter, move through the top of the pipe and through the small glass of the store, we see how it enters and retraces the road traveled. All this in a corner of our screen, on a street in Seastone.Spectacular .
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 can be played without having played the first installment . Here, at first there is no clear plot, an enemy that from the minute one we know we must stop and there are hardly any small comments to what happened in the first part. From chapter three of the five you have, it is when you discover this enemy little by little and here we begin to see the connection with the first part, but until then we only tried a long presentation of the four main
characters: the Ivo elf, the little wizard Wilbur, the cheeky Nate and his always companion, the hairy Critter . The story begins with a hilarious surprise from Ivo, which forces her to go to the city of Seastone, there Wilbur works as a professor of magic
trying not to lose balance in the battle for power, between the arch-magician and the president of the council. On the other hand Nate and the Critter, are in their daily adventures, trying to recover a lamp with genius included.
