What is it?
It seems that
games journalists are constantly bemoaning the saturation of the games
market with sequels: publishers know what has worked in the past,
so assume that the same will work in the future. Okay, a
reasonably fair, but boring, assumption. But I'm not going to bang on
about sequels here; the Book of Unwritten Tales, The Critter
Chronicles is a prequel.
If you've played
the first Book of Unwritten Tales, you'll remember Captain
Nathaniel Bonnet (Nate) and 'Critter', two of the characters you get to
play alongside Ivo (the elf princess) and Wilbur (the gnome inventor).
This new game is the story of how Nate and Critter met and came to be
travelling together by the time of the first... erm, ...second... erm,
...original game. Prequels just confuse me. Curse you, George Lucas!
Of course, the
Critter Chronicles was developed by King Art; the inventive German
team that came up with these intriguing characters in the first place.
Consequently, it is not surprising that the graphic design and the
overall tone of the Critter Chronicles is very similar to the
original Book. Some of the locations even make a comeback.
Is there a plot?
The story of the Critter Chronicles
begins with a confrontation between Nate and Ma'Zaz (the orc mercenary
bounty-hunter from the Book of Unwritten Tales) over an airship
that Nate has 'liberated' from the Red Pirate by winning her in a card
game. Ma'Zaz has been hired to recover the airship, and Nate just wants
to escape to a life where nobody tells him what to do any more. These
goals seem to be somewhat at odds, and both protagonists are armed with
cannon... except that Nate appears to be slightly under-supplied with
ammunition, which is where you take over.
The rest of the plot revolves around a
crash on an ice plain, and Nate's efforts to escape the crash site,
whilst learning about his more altruistic side. We get to meet Petra, an
animal rights activist and vegomaniac, Cornelius Happleflapp, a yeti
hunter, Critter and his family, and Munkus and his Black Guards. Munkus
is one of the characters returning from the Book of Unwritten Tales,
and it is he that Nate and Critter ultimately have to overcome to rescue
Critter's family and to escape from the ice.
I counted roughly 16 locations in the
Critter Chronicles. Some are single screens, others more
panoramic, but all are detailed and full of 'stuff' going on. The
aforementioned places that make a comeback from the Book of Unwritten
Tales are connected with the Archmage's tower - a particularly
mindbending set of locations that are considerably more complex and more
fully realised than they were in the Book.
How do you play?
As with the Book of Unwritten Tales,
the Critter Chronicles is a third person point and click
adventure. The controls are simple; the mouse is used for everything,
and the cursor changes image to indicate hotspots. You can press the
space bar to show all the hotspots in a scene, and you'll find that some
of the hotspots are only good for one or two clicks - these are
descriptive points that add colour, rather than key plot points. You
mostly play the game from the perspective of Nate Bonnet, but there are
times when Critter is also available.
Your inventory of items pops up when
you move the mouse to the bottom centre of the screen. Click on an item
to select it, or right-click to hear what Nate or Critter have to say
about it. Nate and Critter have independent inventories, but you can
pass items between the two of them quite easily. There are also times
when inventory items have to be combined which is just a simple click
and drag operation.
Conversations are also handled with a
menu in the bottom part of the screen, but that menu only pops up when
there are choices to be made. The conversation tree is not complex, but
it is amusing in places. I do miss two elements from the Book
however, and those are Wilbur's lovely Welsh accent, and the frequent
real-world references that peppered the former game. Or maybe I'm just
too slow and dim-of-wit for them this time around?
Any novelties?
The most unusual element in the
Critter Chronicles is that it's an adventure game with levels of
difficulty. At the start of the game, you choose Normal or Hard mode.
Hard mode is subtly changed with respect to Normal mode such that some
of the puzzles require more steps to solve. For example, (this isn't in
the game, but illustrates the difference) let's say that you need some
bread to feed the ducks; in Normal mode, you'll find the bread in the
bakery, but in Hard mode, you'll have to go through, say, three extra
steps to make the bread in the bakery first. Not all puzzles are
like this, but a few are.
The other novelty is that this is the
first mainstream Steam game I've reviewed that is released on Windows
PC, Apple Mac and Ubuntu Linux right from the get-go. It's really
good to see that Steam have finally made this commitment to broadening
the expectations for the platforms that games should support. This
finally allows me to think seriously about making Linux my principal
operating system. I'm sure others will find the same is true, though I
would not say this in any way indicates that everyone should be
considering such a switch.
Oddities
One of the aspects of the Book of
Unwritten Tales with which I was less than overwhelmed was the
struggle to understand Critter. Once Critter is involved in the new
game, it is a continual battle to understand his nonsense, though I do
see that there's a consistency in his speech that makes it decodable.
That's just not fun.
The other part of the culture of Steam
games, aside from the digital downloads and Linux support, is that they
encourage games to be punctuated with Achievements. These are goals like
'Complete the first Chapter on Normal' and 'Complete the first Chapter
on Hard'. Given the reasonably linear nature of this kind of story-led
adventure game, it seems to me that Achievements like this are quite
pointless - you cannot complete the game without obtaining most of them
along the way. What's more, there's no indication whilst you're
playing that you're Achieving, you only find out when you've
finished your session and end up back in your Steam library. I say leave
the Achievements for the stuff that's not on the critical path through
the game.
My final complaint with respect to the
Critter Chronicles is that Nate is a whinger. He complains all
the time. He's often sorry for himself and the situations he finds
himself in, or gets himself into. He was definitely my least favourite
of the main characters from the Book; even Critter, with his
nonsense speech, is less annoying than Nate Bonnet.
Conclusions
When I played the Book of Unwritten Tales I was
left with a silly grin on my face after almost every session of play.
It's disappointing that although the Critter Chronicles maintains
the artistic and technical quality of the Book, they've chosen to
concentrate in the new game on the lesser of the main characters from
the previous one. There are no bugs, no horribly difficult and obscure
puzzles (I only needed help from a walkthrough for one step where I was
being particularly dense), and the production values in the game are
just as highly polished as the Book. It was just not as much
fun. And therein lies the reasoning for my completely subjective
grading.
Grade: B-
What do you need to play it?
PC Requirements:
OS: Windows XP SP3, Vista, 7, 8
Processor: 2.4 GHz, 3GHz recommended
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 9c compatible
graphics card with 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended), Pixelshader 2.0
DirectX®: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 6 GB HD space
Mac Requirements:
OS: Mac OS X 10.6 / 10.7 / 10.8
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Mac Core Duo
Memory: 1500 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel GMA-950 graphics card
with 256MB VRAM or better
Hard Drive: 6 GB HD space
Linux Requirements:
OS: Ubuntu 12.04 or above
Processor: 2.4 GHz, 3GHz recommended
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL compatible graphic
card with 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended), Pixelshader 2.0
Hard Drive: 6 GB HD space
(I used a home-built 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium PC
running on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual 5200+ processor, with 6 GB RAM, and
a Sapphire Radeon HD4670 512MB video card, with on-mother-board,
built-in sound card)
The game can be bought from
The Adventure Shop or
Game homepage.
