I am a big fan of the the original Book of Unwritten Tales and Critter Chronicles is certainly not a terrible game as adventure games go, but the thumb indicates whether I recommended it (not that it's an outright bad game!) and I unfortunately I just can't recommend Critter Chronicles - mainly due to the puzzle quality.

The original game keeps a nice balance between the puzzles being relatively intuitive, yet not quite so blatantly obvious that there's nothing to it. Generally I could always figure out what needed to be done once I found the right items, without resorting to much trial and error. Critter Chronicles, however, strays a bit too far into the territory of some of the more egregious 90s adventure game leaps of logic where the solution is stumbled upon only by exhausting all possible options. More than likely at some point will need to resort to the process of trying to use every item on every other item and hotspot - which is made even more frustrating by having to rather slowly transfer items between two characters, one at a time.

Forgetting the puzzles, the game still retains much of the charm of BoUT. It's still well acted (though Critter's "dialog" did start to grate on me as the game went on) and nice to look at, but the cast and overall scope of the game is much reduced compared to BoUT. It comes out feeling a bit thin as a result.

To a certain extent it seems perhaps a bit unfair to hold it up to the standards of the excellent original BoUT, but that's naturally what one would compare it against, since Critter Chronicles is presumably meant for fans of BoUT. The bottom line is unfortunately that all but the most fanatical of BoUT fans could safely skip Critter Chronicles without feeling like they missed out. I don't regret playing the game, but knowing what I do now, I wouldn't regret having skipped it either.

An enjoyable adventure with plenty of fun jokes. Silly and able to stand on its own, it is a good time for any point and click fan. I liked being able to play from multiple perspectives.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles is a fairly amusing point-and-click adventure. Much of the artwork flows like an oil painting plus the animations give it an extra level of depth and personality. It is obvious the writers and voice actors had a lot of fun in their roles. The game puts several Star Wars parodies in the storyline as well as a few references to Portal. With two characters to control it's almost like playing two stories in one.

Overall, it's a mildly funny game that doesn't get overly difficult.

Although The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles was released later than The Book of Unwritten Tales, it's actually the prequel of the series. However, it's significantly shorter than its sequel. Nevertheless, I found its puzzles and story much better and enjoyable.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles is definitely not even close to a masterpiece but it's still a quite decent point-and-click game.

...which probably should've just been a simple addition to the original. But more on that later. Let's start with the good things - this game, as the original, is fun and funny. It has a lot of cultural references yet manages to be unique and not loose itself in them. It looks fantastic. It mostly keeps puzzles fun and interesting - rarely too easy, rarely too annoying or needlessly complex. Unlike the original, this game is pretty short, which could be a plus, since the game could have had little filler content in it. And it mostly did. Mostly.
However, I couldn't stop thinking, that the game was designed as a short expansion, which would either require the original or would cost less than it does, but then the developers realised that they need to sell it as a standalone game at a specific price, so they decided to "appropriately" fill it with more content. So the last third of the game feels needlessly longer than it should be. Cultural references and jokes become slightly lazier, puzzles require more pointless walking and figuring out what else the game wants you to do. And it's a shame, really, as the game starts very good, and the characters of Nate and Critter are good from the beginning till the end.
This should've been a cheaper expansion/DLC, with most of its last third removed in favor of not tainting the magic of the first two thirds of the game. But I'd still recommend it for those good parts

TLDR: Get it if you liked the previous game, but only on sale

The game is cute and funny with likable characters.
It shows the backstory of how Nate and Critter met.
There is a hard difficulty mode if you want to make the puzzles a bit harder

It's short.
Very few screens, so there is lots of backtracking between the same screens which gets annoying.
Most of the puzzles are unintuitive, forcing you to go the route of clicking / talking / combining everything until something moves you along.
The character switches and passing inventory between them is poorly executed. This was done better in Day of the Tentacle back in the 90s. The makers of Critter Chronicles know about DOTT, since there is a reference to it in the game.
Speaking of, there are way too many pop culture references in the game, replacing actual humor and not really fitting in with the setting established in the previous game

Let me start by saying that I like both "The Book of Unwritten Tales 1" and TBoUT2 a lot and wholeheartedly recommend them both. However, that is not the case with "TBoUT: the Critter Chronicles" which feels like a failed experiment, prior TBoUT2, for testing various game concepts.

The two difficulty options "normal" and "hard" causes far too complicated puzzles on the harder setting. Other puzzles gets harder by having all spoken clues removed. The normal setting is playable but sometimes a puzzle just "ends" without any visible progress feedback since the "hard part" has been cut.

The gibberish speak from Critter itself overstays its welcome fairly rapidly and I quickly tried to maximize the playtime using captain Nate. The other two playable characters from TBoUT1/2 Wilbur Weatherwane and Ivo, are unfortunately not present.

Essentially the Critter Chronicles feels much more unpolished and rushed in comparison to TBoUT1 and 2.

A terrific humorous adventure, with graphics sort of like finely detailed blown glass (though they do look considerably coarser when zoomed in, which isn't often). The puzzles are quite a bit harder than the original Book of Unwritten Tales (which is welcome since it was a tad too easy), but this one has the same great writing and humor that made the first game so dang lovable. Critter Chronicles is a lot shorter, though, but that's to be expected since it is more of a side story than a full game.

The Critter Chronicles is actually a prequel of sorts to the Book of Unwritten Tales Series. The other two games have more story and a far more expansive world to explore than this game. In comparison 'The Critter Tales' feels less developed and smaller. In many ways though, it is meant to be smaller. The story isn't telling a grand arc, it's only really showing you the events that brought two of the BOUT's main characters together. Nate and Critter. It does explore a little about Critter's origins as well as how Nate became Captain of the Mary along with their first team up efforts.

If you played the first two games this game is both a nostalgic sort of romp through the world of Aventasia and a bit of a disappointment. The settings aren't nearly as interesting or visually exciting and there's only really about 15 separate scenes spread over 3 different locations. The story is short but I'd say it was still well written, but the jokes... they seemed to fall a little flat. It just didn't have quite the same impact as the humor of the first two games. There's several references that sort of break the 4th wall, a few modest puns, but nothing that really made it feel like it held its place as a BOUT game.

Gameplay shares some of the same problems the first two games in the series also exhibited. The first is the amount of time it takes characters to swap places when switching from one playable character to another. The second involves swapping inventories from one character to another which is a time consuming action that involves animations that are a little too long and since you can only do one item at a time it takes forever to transfer a full inventory back and forth. Another pitfall is that this game is much more riddled with pixel hunting and randomly trying everything with everything else to progress the storyline. While the original games all have some pixel hunting they maintained a good balance with their puzzles generally avoiding too much "moon logic". This game suffers from excessive moon logic with too many of the puzzles being solved in ways that didn't really make sense or with items you wouldn't think to combine. I felt like the 4th and 5th chapters (the last two) were probably the worst for logical puzzle solving.

Despite being not as good as the first two games in the series it is still an enjoyable play that provides hours of entertainment (even if sometimes frustrating). The game lets you choose to play through on hard mode or normal mode. The difference between the two is that hard mode doesn't allow you to use hotspots and adds some additional steps for several of the main puzzles. If you choose to play through on the hard level you're probably looking at a good 10-12 hours. If you choose the normal mode more like 8-10. Subsequent playthroughs could be significantly lower since most of that time is spent figuring out what to combine in what order and who to talk to. After you know what to do you could quick click through conversations and probably play through the game in maybe 3-4 hours.

The achievements for this game are not well balanced in my opinion. 25 out of the 34 available achievements are story unlocked and unmissible. They require no additional effort to acquire. 10 of those are either-or achievements. You get 5 based on completing the each of the 5 chapters. 5 for hard mode and 5 for normal. You cannot achieve all of them in one playthrough, you must play it twice in order to get them all. The other 9 achievements generally involve repeating an action 3 times or getting something right the first attempt.

Overall, I'd recommend this for fans of the original BOUT games as you do get to revisit some favorite characters. If you really love point & click games, you will probably still like this game too. However, if "moon logic" games of the 90s really bothered you and you couldn't stand the idea of playing more of that, you might want to avoid this one.

Well. It's very better than The book of Unwritten Tales.

It has difficulty level for the riddles. You can still turn on the Show Points so you won't have pixel hunting even in HARD mode.
But the riddles are difficult enough in front of the first part of the series.
If you play the game in normal mode you 'll have more hints by the characters and you 'll miss a couple of riddles. Generally the game does NOT change much. So play it at hard anyway!

The graphics are about the same with the difference of the settings. You don't have complicated settings like AA Anisotropic or Antialiasing. You choose between smoothness and Picture quality and that's it. Well in the first part the antialising thing mattered . I had it in 8X. Here the differences are small to nothing. Try "Low" in smoothness and "Medium" in picture quality. The last one sets the textures sent to the graphic card. If set to the best it will sent uncompressed textures directly to the graphics card so even the best cards may NOT handle some scenes and you ll have glitches. You have more vivid colors but the difference is that and ONLY that. So set it to medium and enjoy the game with more earth colors. The graphics are 3D Indie so the colors are vivid enough anyway.

I wasn't amazed by the story BUT is better than the fisrt part and you have the critter to break the ice and makes you laugh. But still is better from the first. I enjoyed this game much MORE than the first one.

All the others like sounds , story , characters and more.... Come on.. You play an adventure and NOT the final episode of Call of Duty or other game to see things in Reality. We have imagination as players and all the game things are MORE than OK.

To all adventurers... Put the difficulty to Hard and FLY. You'll love it!