TLDR: An unfinished and buggy game you might love anyway.

General Thoughts/Overview:

The book of unfinished, sorry, unwritten tales (BUWT) is on shaky ground to begin with. It is specifically targeted at people like me. That is to say, unashamed nerds who enjoy point and click adventures. Which is probably not as niche a market as one would expect, given the crossover, but still. Absolutely ram packed with referential humour, the game will make little-to-no sense if you don’t have a broad love of all classic fantasy and sci-fi, as well as quite a few even more niche jokes and references, clearly crowbarred in by the creators based on their favourite shows, books, memes, and games.

Our story is standard fantasy point and click fare. A Dark wizard, an artefact of immeasurable power, a young hero, an unlikeable ass with a heart and a furry companion who can’t speak, a half-naked elven princess, a magic ring with unreadable script carved into it, and an adventure where you rub things on other things, complete inane tasks in senseless but creative ways, and talk to people over and over again.

Pros:

• I found BUWT to be hilarious and charming, mostly. I got so many references and I wonder how many I missed, but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the tropes and nods turned on their heads and jammed in as often and deeply as possible. It did often get a bit much, and made quite a lot of the puzzles and story predictable or stretched real far to try and squeeze them in… But it also felt like that was intentional.
  
• Each of the main 3 characters (Game says 4, but one is a tack on at best) has their own personality, capabilities, skills, and an attempt at a character arc. They seem fleshed out and have solid archetype ideals and backgrounds. I enjoyed a lot of the interactions between them and liked that they did go through character arcs.
  
• The music is passable, the voice acting is spot on, and the artwork fits the theme extremely well. If it weren’t for the glitches and optimisation issues, the general feel of the game would be extremely positive.

Cons:

• The hugely other franchise and series based humour is quite exclusory. It would be difficult to understand why characters say and do the things they do without a massive basis in these other stories, memes, and tropes. This also gives the game an extremely dated feel. And while I was lucky and it brought me back to my youth and I thoroughly enjoyed it, I can’t help but wonder what my kids would think (probably, “wtf, dad?”).
  
• So. Many. Bugs. A minimum of 25% of my play through was spent alt tabbed looking for bug fixes and work arounds, and I only looked to fix game breaking bugs. (Such as broken stone disks in the temple, which I fixed by using Wilbur to look at them then switching back to Ivo, Nate getting stuck under water in the temple fixed by Ivo pressing the button again, Items not spanwing, fixed by switching characters out of screen then moving back in, game freezing, then acting like I’d progressed, fixed by saving, reloading before the problem, then reloading back again, and dialogue not triggering, fixed by moving in and out of a scene until it triggered)
  
• The game isn’t finished. You can see the moment they ran out of budget or time and just ended it with a rushed bridging scene and a literal end cut scene you had no part in.

Suggested improvements:

• Double click to move, or walking pace that isn’t rage inducing.
  
• Stop moving the characters around while changing.
  
• FIX THIS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GAME. I want to play the second one, I really do… but based off of this one I don’t know if I should spend my money on it. An incomplete game? Bugged to hell and back? Dragged out by needless padding in changing character? Please. Fix this and put a good foot forward… It’s been almost a decade, I’m sure you could find the time to give it some love.

Overall Recommendation:

Overall, I really want to recommend this game, but cannot in good conscience.

Bug ridden, unfinished, and requiring so many previous unrelated experiences to make sense of… this game is truly aimed at an extremely narrow band of players. And while I fall into that band, I don’t think I’d suggest this to very many others unless I knew for sure they’d get it and overlook the glaring flaws.

So no, sadly I’d air on the side of caution and give this a miss.