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I finally played this game. It was charming, with a few nice characters, enjoyable graphics, strong voice acting.

The negatives were obvious. I’m not being sensational when I say that there was never a time that I didn’t know exactly what to do. If you look at everything and empty every dialogue tree the next thing to do is plain as day. The game was short. Also, while I enjoyed the characters you never get to play them enough to develop a relationship.

I would like to finish the story and play the next game but I was hoping I could get everyone’s feelings on the next chapter before I waste my time and money downloading it. Also, any discussions regarding the first game would be fun to entertain.

if you considered BoUT short (which didn’t seem for me that way) I don’t know who would consider Critter Chronicles length !! its short.

I loved Book of Unwritten Tales, but I disliked The Critter Chronicles. While BOUT has several interesting settings, in TCC almost all of the game takes place in 5 snowy screens, by the end of the game, even with the amount of detail in the screens, I was bored by the locations. While BOUT had a decent length, TCC is very short. While BOUT had some interesting characters, TCC takes the two most annoying of them and centers the game around them. While in BOUT you allways know what to do next, in TCC (on highest difficulty) you’ll be clueless most of the time as the puzzles are often obscure and there is virtually no in-game direction. Nate’s voice acting is annoying, and being the main character in TCC, he becomes considerably more annoying than he was in BOUT, and to top it off, the Critter is even MORE annoying and Mazaz’s voice (or whatever her name was) sounds like a knitting grandmother, not a fierce orc. I miss Wilbur…

There really is a big difference in quality in these two games, and no matter how much you liked BOUT, you should be prepared to be disappointed by TCC.

Personally I liked BOUT better than I’ve liked any Pendulo adventures. And I have to admit I had much more fun with it than most Deadelic games as well. I’ve yet to play Critter Chronicles, so I can’t really comment on that.

I finished BoUT tales yesterday and to say it’s short is ludicrous. There’s a built in clock showing how long you’ve played for and I clocked in at just under 16 hours. I was only stuck a couple of times and then not for any great length of time.

Overall a pretty good game but I’m not going for CC for all the reasons stated above.

I belong to the minority that actually liked The Critter Chronicles, and I believe that it got a lot of flak simply because fans of BoUT expected too much from it.

Yes it is a short game, but it was never marketed as a full size game only as a short prequel to BoUT and prized accordingly (as I remember), and it is still much longer than e.g. SF: Sam Peters is.

Yes over half of the game takes place at a single location, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You can have games where you travel all around the world exploring new exciting locations, but where each location is more or less static and only requires you to solve one or few puzzles each screen. Or you can have a game with few locations but have the scenes change dynamically so there is a constant flow of new puzzles and new problems to deal with at the same places. I would hate for all games to use the same formula, and imo TCC does the latter quite well giving it a nice compact fell. But I guess this comes down to taste and what you want from an AG.

Yes Nate is the least interesting character in BoUT and not the best protagonist in the history of AG, but that is to a large degree compensated by the Critters which I simply loved.

Yes there is a few poorly designed puzzle, but there is also some very interesting puzzles. And in all honesty what game doesn’t contain a few slips in the puzzle department?

Overall I still believe TCC is a nice little game, and much much much better than The Raven (also from KingArt), just don’t expect it to at the same standard as BoUT is.

Thanks for the responses. Perhaps BOUT seemed short because I wasn’t challenged. I also took 3 weeks off due to a vacation.

I probably won’t be purchasing the next chapter. I can’t get on board paying full price for what some have described as the developers never intended for it to be a full game. Also, as many have brought out, Nate was not my favorite.

I’m not sure I would call 10€ (current sale on Steam) a full price

Iznogood - 01 December 2013 12:29 PM

Yes over half of the game takes place at a single location, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You can have games where you travel all around the world exploring new exciting locations, but where each location is more or less static and only requires you to solve one or few puzzles each screen. Or you can have a game with few locations but have the scenes change dynamically so there is a constant flow of new puzzles and new problems to deal with at the same places. I would hate for all games to use the same formula, and imo TCC does the latter quite well giving it a nice compact fell. But I guess this comes down to taste and what you want from an AG.

This is a good point, and you’re probably right that it comes down to taste. A game where you get to explore lots of different settings is much more likely to appeal to me than one where you’re in the same spot all along. I probably came off overly negative in my previous post. I don’t want to discourage anyone from playing TCC, because it does have its moments, there are some fun puzzles and the backgrounds (though there aren’t many of them) are beautiful. If you liked BOUT, I’d say you should try it, but I think your chances of enjoying it is gonna be much higher if you don’t expect it to measure up with BOUT, because it simply doesn’t. I do agree that it’s better than The Raven (allthough I liked The Raven’s first episode, but sadly, it went downhill from there imo).