The Book of Unwritten Tales

The Book of Unwritten Tales is the original entry in KING Art's beloved fantasy point-and-click series, set in the wicked world of Aventásia. The framing story turns on Mortimer MacGuffin — an aged gremlin archaeologist whose name is a deliberate genre joke — and the dark secret of a powerful artifact whose ownership will determine the fate of the world. The Army of the Shadows sends its best agents after the secret, and the Alliance's four heroes find themselves drawn involuntarily into the crisis.

The game's signature is its humor. The script lovingly spoofs Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Discworld, World of Warcraft and dozens of other genre touchstones, but the affection is sincere — the parody works because the game knows the source material intimately. Multi-character gameplay rotates between four protagonists (Wilbur, Nate, Ivo and the Critter) sometimes individually and sometimes simultaneously, with puzzles that require coordinated action between two or three characters.

The scope is the other half of the appeal. Roughly twenty hours of gameplay spread across approximately sixty hand-drawn locations, more than forty NPCs and around 250 interactable items — with over 150 puzzles ranging from tightly logical to brain-bendingly indirect. The cast of characters includes two-headed ogres, vegetarian dragons and good-natured zombies among the more conventional fantasy archetypes, and the writing finds room to develop genuine emotional beats between the jokes.