I don’t know what it is about German developers and adventure games, but between King Art and Daedalic the genre is thriving as strong as it ever has. Perhaps magical adventure game fairies have sprinkled something in their drinking water. If so, I wish more developers could get a sip.

Following the successes of The Book of Unwritten Tales, King Art is back in point-and-click action with The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief, a decidedly different type of adventure game that is every bit as rich and compelling. Designed in the style of an Agatha Christie crime thriller, The Raven delivers a taut, intriguing, and rather charming mystery drama about an infamous master thief who was thought to be dead at the hands of a hotshot detective. But years after his supposed death, when a precious jewel is stolen from a museum and a raven’s feather calling card is left at the scene of the crime, the plot thickens. Has The Raven returned? Has a copycat picked up where he left off? Or was he never killed in the first place? The answer to these questions will be revealed in due time as the episodic storyline continues over the next couple of months.

For the first chapter, The Eye of the Sphinx, the story begins aboard the Orient Express (go figure!), where player character Constable Anton Jakob Zellner soon finds himself caught up in a whodunit case of thievery and murder as he learns that the train he is posted to is transporting something of tremendous importance and value–and that one of the passengers is suspected of being the legendary burglar. The Swiss policeman isn’t supposed to get involved, but his inquisitive mind, gift of gab and nose for sniffing out the suspicious lead him on his own investigation to help get to the bottom of whatever is happening.

Agatha Christie’s influences can be felt from the game’s opening moments. In fact, there’s a character in the game who just so happens to be a retired mystery novel writer most famous for her character Partout, which sounds eerily similar to Christie’s iconic detective Poirot. Coincidence? I doubt it. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Constable Zellner invokes the same sort of spirit and demeanor as Poirot. He’s even got the same glorious moustache! All of the other characters perfectly mesh with the whodunit murder mystery motif, starting with the arrogant French investigator and moving on down the line, from the snooty baroness to the rascally young boy to the shady doctor to the spoiled daughter who has some serious daddy issues to work out. Yes, the personalities are a bit cliché, but the excellent voice acting and expressive facial animations allow the characters to endear themselves to the player in a likeable, believable way.

It’s a shame then that the character movement doesn’t achieve the same stellar quality of animation. Whether using the traditional point-and-click method of mouse control or an Xbox 360 controller, Constable Zellner walks around with the gracefulness of a tank. Playing with a gamepad is nice because click-able clue indicators automatically appear as you walk by so there is no falling into the dreaded adventure game trap of hunting for hot spots. However, actually getting Jakob to go where you want by commanding his legs in real time with analog sticks–combined with the fixed camera angle shifts–brings back bad memories of old-school Resident Evil and Tomb Raider games. Default mouse control is far more reliable for getting from point A to point B; the main issue is getting the good Constable to transition to the next area. On many occasions clicking on a door or flight of steps to proceed out of a room will send Zellner’s AI into a confused animation loop where he’ll sort of wander back and forth a couple of times or bump into nearby walls until suddenly the switch flips in his head and he sniffs out where he’s supposed to be going. It doesn’t help that the fairly standard adventure game mechanic of double-clicking on a transition point to “fast travel” to the next scene is nowhere to be found.

Fortunately this is more of a glitchy eyesore than a hindrance to enjoying the other overwhelmingly positive elements the game has going for it. Puzzle design is a definite bright spot. You won’t find any illogically kooky item combinations or out of place mini-games here. One particular puzzle where you must feed a guard a salty ham and egg breakfast and then sneakily knock over his bottle of water from a distance with a slingshot so he leaves his post due to the salt overload, is the only sort of “out there” puzzle in the game, yet within the context of what’s going on in the story at the time it actually does make sense and isn’t all that hard to figure out.

Occasionally you will need to pull a MacGyver. For example, at one point you will need to create a homemade torch using a broken chair leg, a window curtain, and some form of accelerant. Everything else in the game boils down to examining evidence and gathering clues through NPC conversations, which can even lead to a number of secret objectives and discoveries that aren’t necessary to completing the game and don’t alter the main story events, but do flesh out certain back stories to provide clearer insight on a particular character’s motivations. These optional objectives also tend to come tethered to an achievement as well as an unlockable goodie in the extras menu, like a concept art gallery or a soundtrack player.

The real detective work begins during the episode’s final act, when the setting shifts to a cruise ship and the crime shifts from simple theft to cold-blooded murder. It is during this part of the game when you will spend the most time collecting and examining bits of evidence like a true investigator, such as matching the signature patterns of two discharged bullets under a microscope or swabbing a blood sample and using chemicals to test its authenticity.

At the end of the chapter, which should take the average player in the ballpark of 4-6 hours (it took me about 7, but I was pretty anal about trying to find everything and explore every possible conversation), your skills as a detective are rated based on how many secret investigations were completed and how many Adventure Points were used. These Adventure Points can be used throughout the game to receive a hint or highlight all available hot spots, but your score will be higher in the end if you refrain from spending them. Unfortunately early on in the game I hit the clue button a couple times just to see what it did, so my final score was docked crucial points that I think prevented me from earning a couple of the rarer game completion achievements.

Like any good whodunit mystery, The Raven gives you just enough reason to question the motives and guilt/innocence of every cast member, and slowly allows you to pull back the layers and put the pieces together. I’m not particularly fond of the episodic format King Art chose for this game, but that’s mainly because the first chapter’s sudden cliffhanger ending lacks resolution and only left me eager to continue the adventure. Clearly that should be taken as a positive sign of how engaging the story is; it just stinks having to wait another month to see what happens next when all I want to do is keep playing. (And then it’ll be another whole month after that before the concluding third episode will be available.) However, if King Art is able to utilize the extra time between chapters to better optimize the gamepad controls and clean up the animation glitches, the wait could turn out to be a blessing in disguise. We’ll just have to wait and see on that, but if this opening episode is any indication, the complete tale of The Raven is going to be well worth sticking around for.

Pros:
+ Riveting whodunit-style storyline
+ Likeable, expressive characters populating a richly detailed game world
+ Logical puzzles fit naturally within the context of the narrative
+ Optional side investigations and unlockable extras
+ Avoids many dreaded adventure game foibles like hot spot hunting and nonsensical item combinations

Cons:
– Weird animation loops and scene transition glitches
– Poorly implemented gamepad controls
– Episodic format means teasing cliffhangers and waiting a month between chapters
– Can’t double-click to jump to the next scene

Game Info:
Platform: PC/Mac/Linux (versions for PS3 and Xbox 360 are also scheduled for later this summer)
Publisher: Nordic Games/The Adventure Company
Developer: King Art Games
Release Date: 7/23/2013
Genre: Point-and-click adventure/mystery
ESRB Rating: Teen
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by publisher

[nggallery id=3000]

Analysts and prognosticators always love to blab on and on about how adventure gaming is dead. Such proclamations are, of course, a complete load of horse crap. Just because millions of gamers are lining up to buy the next Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto and not the latest game of point-and-click puzzle solving doesn’t mean an entire genre has gone extinct.

Adventure gaming isn’t dead, and it never died. On the contrary, I don’t think adventure gaming has ever been stronger. Sure, the genre doesn’t have the same notoriety as it did in its heyday when Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert were making folks laugh their point-and-click-loving asses off with games like Grim Fandango and Tales of Monkey Island, but developers like Telltale, Daedalic, Frictional Games, Pendulo, Wadjet Eye and various other indies are banging out one great adventure after another. Just poke around on Steam and other digital download services, and you’ll discover an incredible selection to choose from.

Be sure to now add KING Art to that list, as the German Studios’ The Book of Unwritten Tales can hold its own against any adventure game released within the last decade, I say.

Lots of pointing, lots of clicking, lots of reading/listening to dialogue. That’s what you get from this classically-formulated adventure, and fortunately it all holds up under the weight of modern scrutiny due to the strength of its clever writing, witty character banter, and enjoyable voice acting performances abroad. You won’t find photo-realistic graphics or lots of killing and explosions, but what you will find is something that many of today’s most popular games lack: soul.

The Book of Unwritten Tales is a whimsical fantasy yarn about a ragtag trio of adventurers (plus a Critter that looks like a Fraggle Rock castaway) brought together by an extraordinary series of events. At the heart of the story is Wilbur Weathervane, a Frodo-like gnome who sits at home doing odd jobs at the local pub (like hunting rats!), always dreaming about magic and going off on grand adventures. Early on he’s even burdened with the task of delivering a ring to a powerful arch mage. Gee, that sure sounds familiar.

Joining Wilbur on this journey of utmost importance are Ivo, a scantily clad forest elf princess who gets caught up in the plot when she stumbles upon a gremlin archaeologist named MacGuffin being kidnapped by an evil mage and his brutish troll servant, and Nate, a brash treasure hunter type who’s generally only concerned about himself and how he can save his own keister. Together, this mismatched bunch sets out to recover a legendary artifact that will help end the war against the Shadow Army.

Wilbur is a lovable little fellow, but I thought the other two protagonists were mostly forgettable. However, the strength of this game’s narrative comes from its silly sense of humor and from the many memorable side characters you will encounter throughout the lengthy quest. I still vividly remember conversations with a meek dragon reading a book on how to become a beast of fear like her kin and snobby, talking termites with an appreciation for munching on vintage wooden boards of a particular year. Then there was the time I saw Nate get rescued by a zombie and a harlequin ghost who had decided to form an organization to show that beings of the undead aren’t all out to eat brains and terrorize people. I’ll also never forget Wilbur’s run in with an old mage teacher and a shopkeeper obsessed with playing some strange political MMORPG together. To break the addiction and get them back to work, you literally have to pour bugs into the servers operated by a monkey, and then watch as the two disgruntled gamers go off the rails about how unforgivable it is that the developers could release such a broken game.

If I haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, Unwritten Tales is constantly poking fun at itself and the current state of gaming, and is also keen on parodying/referencing major plot points from The Lord of the Rings and other entertainment franchises. Off the top of my head, I recall fun spoofs of iconic scenes from Star Wars and Mission Impossible, not to mention countless jabs at fantasy RPG tropes like tedious fetch questing and other menial tasks.

Like many adventure games of the point-and-click persuasion, the pace can plod along in a few spots when you’re stumped on a puzzle or have to backtrack through environments to chat up NPCs until you trigger the exact line of dialogue that opens up the next scenario. Sometimes all items have been collected and you’ll have already figured out the solution to a puzzle, yet you won’t be able to proceed because you missed a new line of dialogue that only became available after first going through the original conversation. This can lead to wasted time and, of course, frustration.

Depending on your skills of deduction, some trial and error may also come into play at times when you feel the need to systematically go through your inventory and randomly drag items over one another to see if any go together. But by and large the item combinations and subsequent puzzles make complete sense. Somehow the game manages to throw a lot of goofball conundrums at you without breaking logic, and that’s a remarkable accomplishment in design balance for any adventure game to achieve.

Puzzle diversity is another highlight. Early on you’ll be jumping between the different characters during their solo portions of the game, but later in the story, once the heroes have formed their fellowship, you get the opportunity to control multiple characters and utilize a form of solo cooperation that has you trading items and switching back and forth to access areas the other character(s) may not be able to reach. The developers also do a fantastic job of regularly changing perspective. Most of the lavishly detailed environments are presented in a traditional third-person 3D view, but as the adventure progresses the camera will sometimes shift to a bird’s eye view or have you looking in at the world like a 2D side-scroller.

Regularly the bane of the genre, monotonous cursor hotspot hunting is negated–if you choose to take advantage of it–by the ability to hold down on the Space Bar to have all interactive objects within a given scene marked by a magnifying glass or some other pertinent icon. This would seem to make the game too easy, but it doesn’t; it simply cuts down the tedium of combing over the screen with the mouse pointer, pixel by pixel, until you discover a clickable thing. Challenge in an adventure game shouldn’t come from forcing the player to spend hours scouring a scene with a fine-toothed comb to find the items they need to get by but rather the design of the puzzles that have the player figuring out how to combine the items they’ve gathered to solve the perplexing impediment at hand. This is an area where Unwritten Tales excels.

For an adventure game, Unwritten Tales‘ five chapters make for one thick virtual story book. As a seasoned adventure game player, I was able to finish in right around 12 hours, only getting stumped in a couple spots, but most average players should expect to spend 15-20 hours helping Wilbur and gang save the world. This lengthy runtime is definitely a good thing because, as usual, there is nothing—not even Steam Achievements–to inspire you to immediately want to play the game again. But even if you only play one time, $20 is a great value for the size and quality of the game you’re paying for. Fork over an extra five bucks and you’ll also score a pack of digital bonuses, including the full soundtrack (which is excellent, by the way), a “Making of” video, and a nice PDF art booklet.

Outside of Heavy Rain, adventure gaming really hasn’t been innovated upon since the genre’s LucasArts golden age, which is probably why the mainstream routinely fails to recognize its continued existence. This game certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel either, but what it does do is hone every common adventure game design convention into an experience that is both mentally engaging and artistically captivating. Simply put, The Book of Unwritten Tales is bursting with heart and personality. It may not win you over with groundbreaking innovations, but I dare you to resist its endearing charm.

Pros:
+ Puzzles are often goofy yet still have logical, intuitive solutions
+ Fun use of parody and self-referential humor
+ Memorable character encounters and conversations
+ Beautifully realized video game world, visually and aurally

Cons:
– Familiar genre drawbacks like backtracking and scripted scenarios occasionally bog things down
– No inherent replay value; Achievements would have been a nice touch for the new Steam release

Game Info:
Platform: PC
Publisher: Nordic Games
Developer: KING Art Games
Release Date: 7/31/2012
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by publisher

[nggallery id=2631]