After the great success of The Book of Unwritten Tales, KING Art Games returned with a Kickstarter campaign for The Book of Unwritten Tales 2. Despite being just 30 hours since the campaign began, KING Art has reached its funding goals, with 1,306 backers pledging $69,397 (the original goal being $65,000) as of this writing. There are still 38 days to go before the Kickstarter wraps up.

As a point-and-click adventure, the game sees you taking on the role of one of four characters as they explore a world rife with references and spoofs of popular fantasy properties like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Discworld and much more. KING Art is also promising about 20 hours of gameplay along with hundreds unique puzzles.

Since reaching their funding goal, the developer has released a new video along with stretch goals for the campaign. The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 releases on PC, Mac and Linux in the beginning of 2015.

Taking place after the events of the original, The Fire Within stars the eponymous hero and his sidekick trying to break him out of a Chinese prison. They soon embark on a journey to acquire a legendary treasure, resulting in a globe trotting journey with a late 19^th century backdrop. You don’t need to have played the original to get the gist of what’s going on, but I felt my ignorance of Jack Keane 1 led to a fair bit of misinformation regarding the characters and their histories.

Still, the writing remains fairly confident throughout, recreating a Monkey Island style of comedy with a light peppering of pop culture references. There are still a few clunky dialogues to be had though, and the script never reaches the pinnacle of humour that the original Monkey Island touched upon so effortlessly.

Whilst the promised humour is there (albeit in a derivative manner), the depiction of a modern adventure game is only partially realised. Jack Keane 2 certainly makes an effort to expand upon the core point and click mechanics the genre is known for. It adds jumping and fast movement speeds to the equation, but this has the side effect of making for a fiddly control scheme.

"Where Jack Keane sadly drops all hints of forward thinking adventure design is in its puzzles."

Multiple options revolve around a WASD set-up and standard click to move varieties. You can also click and drag to move, but this often means your clicks to investigate the environment go unregistered and just move your character in crazy directions. It’s annoying there wasn’t a way to disable certain movement types in the options menu.

The double-edged sword of originality further hacks at Jack Keane through its inclusion of combat. This is still an adventure game though so, naturally, combat is a turn-based affair. It simply involves you reading your enemy’s animations and choosing an appropriate attack or defence from a list. It’s a nice idea, but one that ultimately becomes repetitive later in the game.

Where Jack Keane sadly drops all hints of forward thinking adventure design is in its puzzles. The point and click formula remains tried and tested, forcing you to hunt for a variety of objects before combining and examining them in a specific order for a solution. Finding the objects is quite the task in the first place though, a trial painfully extended by fixed camera angles that often obscure the environment. A button on the HUD helpfully highlights items you can acquire but, even when abusing this feature, some objects are still so small that you may miss them altogether.

"Bright and crisp textures and character models are interspersed with uncanny and glitchy animations. "

Even when you get every item needed in your inventory, what to do with them isn’t always entirely clear. The puzzle logic is decidedly retro, requiring a specific and often obscure solution with little to no compromise. Case in point, I managed to create a makeshift torch and bomb to blast through a locked door. That must work, right? Apparently not, for a second DIY explosive was needed unbeknownst to me. That’s at least fifteen minutes of aimless wondering I’m not getting back.

Further issues occur when the game takes place in Jack’s unconscious. It’s a cool setting to utilise and one that is vibrant and creative. By removing real world logic though, the puzzle solutions become even more obscure. Though the puzzles are well designed, there is a reason why fewer point and clicks take on such abstract settings. A hint system would have helped immensely in assuaging these issues.

Just like the gameplay itself, the production values are a mix of old and new. Bright and crisp textures and character models are interspersed with uncanny and glitchy animations. Other issues arise from sound effects cutting out. The rest of the audio is better handled, with fairly expressive voice acting.

"A few technical areas break the immersion, but otherwise you are looking at a solid entry into the point and click adventure canon."

Despite finding Jack’s voice initially unbearable, the vocal track does grow on you after a time. My issue comes in some casual racism peppered throughout. Plenty of stereotypes are covered, so I’m not accusing the game of some targeted hate crime or anything so serious as that, but the faux British and Chinese accents aren’t something I was hugely comfortable with. Had the humour been a bit more clever I may have made an exception, but the old “Germans have no sense of humour” gag is getting old.

The promise of a reinvented genre is never upheld in Jack Keane 2, but that isn’t to say the game is deficient in any way. A few technical areas break the immersion, but otherwise you are looking at a solid entry into the point and click adventure canon. Of course, puzzle solutions are as cryptic as they always are in the genre, but the satisfaction is plentiful enough to appeal to fans of the genre who dig this style of gameplay. Particularly if you want another dose of Monkey Island style adventure, Jack Keane will cater to your tastes nicely. If you are new to the genre though, there are better point and clicks to start on.

This game was reviewed on PC.

If you are familiar with point-and-click adventure games then this will be no different than any other game in this genre. All you do is click on different objects in the scene and try to figure out what to click on and what to do next. Puzzles may also require to combine certain objects in your inventory to create another object and use it on a particular character, or on something in the scene. Sometimes, you even have to interact and have conversations with characters to actually make them do a certain action in order to continue the story, talking to characters can also help you find clues.

The story acts as a prequel to The Book of Unwritten Tales on how Critters met Nate. In this prequel you will be playing as both Nate and Critters separated into different sections for each character. One of the main issues I have with this main game is that it’s can be really frustrating and annoying on trying to figure out what to do next. You can use the space-bar button to show you all of the points of interest in the scene, but even then you can still be at a loss on what’s going on in.

You won’t be able to tell if you need to combine certain objects in your inventory, or move your character somewhere else and use a particular item on something in the scene. This level of frustration can cause you to either quit the game, or just never come back to it once you have figured it out. This game is not for everyone and it requires a lot of patience. If you are super patient, and feel comfortable enough to try to spend a lot of time to figure out where to go and what to do next, then by all means play the game. Thankfully the game is not frustrating throughout majority of the course, it’s only some of the puzzles that can be.

Despite the game’s frustrating levels of the puzzles the humor and the art style can really help the players to keep on going and help them to finish the game. This is one of the most beautiful point-and-click adventure games I have ever seen, or played in my life, and that says a lot. The amount of drawn 2D art and combination of 3D is astounding, it’s really a great visual feat. Once you get into the rhythm of this game and figure out how the puzzle solving works, this game can be a complete blast.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles has a difficulty options, the higher the difficulty the more puzzles you have to solve in order to progress through the game. In order for the player to enjoy the game at their full brain capacity would be to play on the hardest difficult. When you play the hard difficulty you actually have to be able to solve all the puzzles in order to progress, also the help menu is disabled by default on hard difficulty  it can be turned back on in the settings menu if you wish.

In conclusion The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles is a hit or miss for the point-and-click genre fans. Some fans might just fall in love with the world, humorous dialogue  awesome art style and continue to play and try to beat the game at it’s highest difficulty setting, While other can easily just be turned off by the frustrating puzzles and the amount of time it may take to solve them. This game is not for everyone, but if you don’t some of the frustrating puzzles, then I suggest you check it out and play this game first, if you haven’t played the original one yet.

The game was reviewed on the PC.