The Book of Unwritten Tales, developed by King Art and published by Nordic Games in 2011, was a surprise adventure gaming hit thanks to its sense of humor, which drew a lot of comparisons to the venerable LucasArts games of old. The game managed to entice a large enough following for Nordic to feel comfortable going back to the well to further explore the world. Andrew Barker and I had a chance to sit down with with Philipp Brock from Nordic to get a first look at the sequel, the aptly named Book of Unwritten Tales 2.

Our brief look at the game introduced to us to the protagonist, a beautiful elf named Ivo. "Elves are supposed to get married and be beautiful," explained Brock. "She has to escape her prison, if you will."

The game starts with you controlling Ivo and pointing your clicking your way out of your home, escaping the watchful eye of a very annoying (and vain) bird. "We wanted to move away from interactive movies to more classic point and click adventures," said Brock.

Any attempts to leave while under the watchful eye of your bird means that it begins to sound an alarm, so the puzzle demonstrated had us using the vanity of this (and all) pet birds by moving a mirror over a trap to catch it. One thing that is immediately noticeable in the game even in this brief sequence is the incredible attention to detail in the environments, as well as the very stylistic look of the characters. "We wanted to make thing uniquely stylistic," said Brock. "When you walk different distances for example — if Ivo walks a short distance she'll take different steps than if you want her to walk across the screen." Ivo also demonstrated at least 4 or 5 different animations while simply standing still during our presentation, showing that a great deal of effort is going in to making sure the personalities of the characters comes through.

Despite Nordic's publishing backing, King Art also did a successful Kickstarter for the Book of Unwritten Tales 2, which provided additional funding to add even more content and the opportunity to add additional camera angles and character perspectives. "We're talking about a massive game — about 20 hours now for the base game, plus additional content," explained Brock.

When "additional content" set off alarm bells for myself and Andrew, Brock assured us that he was not talking about DLC. All content in the game will be available on the day of release, but the base story itself will take the estimated 20 hours. Additional content or "side quests," as Brock called them, will be optional but give you a chance to explore some of the other characters in greater depth if you want.

Although very little of the game itself was demonstrated, the look of the game was quite lovely; a huge leap forward over the original Book of Tales. Even though playing the first game won't be necessary to enjoy the Book of Unwritten Tales, we were told that many callbacks and references will be made to the first game. So if you missed it, now is your chance to play it before the sequel's estimated Q1 2015 release on PC, Mac and Linux (with Steam Early Access coming as soon as Q3 of this year).