I’m starting to think that The Book of Unwritten Tales is shooting for the dubious title of “The Duke Nukem Forever of classic-style adventure games.” Not because it’s a terrible parody of things that don’t exist, with naked boobies all over the place, but because companies keep teasing us, saying that “it’s definitely gonna come out, yep, it really is this time,” and it NEVER DOES. IT JUST NEVER DOES.
It was released in Germany back in 2009 to great acclaim, along with this trailer:
Which got everyone very excited, because it gave us all hope that a non-Telltale adventure game might be funny, too. And it was going to be full-length, none of this episodic bullshit! And it was going to have three main characters, like Day of the Tentacle! Everyone loves Day of the Tentacle!
Then later that year, The Adventure Company announced that they were going to publish it in the U.S., and all us adventure nerds held our breath…and then it got delayed…and delayed…and delayed…and delayed…and then the friggin’ publisher went out of business, so that never happened.
But now the game’s original developer, KING Art, is taking the “if you think YOU can do a better job, why don’t you do it yourself?” approach, and they’ve announced that they’ll be bringing it to U.S. shores personally this fall. They also released a brand-new trailer (which actually didn’t seem as funny to me as the original German one):
And four minutes of gameplay footage:
Here’s hoping this book doesn’t get closed yet again!
