Red_Avatar: A review of mine:
TBoUT is a rare thing - a modern adventure game that doesn't use cheap 3D with bad animation. Heck, an adventure game that is FUNNY! And looks great! Surely something must be wrong? It must be too short, have crappy puzzles, bad voice actors, a horrible story, flat characters? Nope, nope, nope, nope and nope - voice actors are mostly top notch, the story, while not ground breaking is more than adequate, puzzles are mostly very logical, the game is nice and lengthy and the characters are unusually entertaining compared to those of most other games of the past few years.
There's a lot of specific good things about TBoUT, though. For example, most actions in the game have their own accurate animation instead of a standard one that gets used as default, giving it a nice polished feeling not to mention one of high production values. The same goes for the voice actors - they actually make an effort to sound good and even if some of the lines can be a little wonky (no doubt due to the translation which is great 99% of the time) they still sound more than convincing.
But the biggest boon of the game, is its comedy: parody, satire, sarcasm and slapstick all thrown together, like in the good old LucasArts days. Two people playing a fantasy version of World of Warcraft (called World of Bureaucracy in the game) with a lot of mocking references ... or Death complaining about how no-one dies in adventure games anymore ... or the many references to Indiana Jones. Some of it is a little obvious, but it's usually delivered in a great way that still makes you smile. Heck, there's one puzzle involving a rabbit that had me almost falling off my chair in laughter which hasn't happened in a long time!
The puzzles may disappoint the seasoned adventure fan, though - you don't have huge areas with dozens of screens to explore at the same time. The game is split up in chapters which each only give you a couple of locations to visit. The game also lets you look at a lot of items after which the item can no longer be selected meaning that the items that are still selectable are obviously used in a puzzle at some point. This means that I've been able to play nearly the entire game without any hints or help without getting stuck for more than a few minutes. For me, this is ideal since the puzzles still make you think but for others, it may be too easy and lack a challenge.
In the end, I have to conclude that this is the best adventure I've played in the past 5 years, easily. It has good production values, the art looks great, the comedy is largely spot on and it doesn't have insane puzzles. A solid 9/10 from me and I'm very picky about my adventure games! (Gemini Rue was just a 7.5/10 for example)
If you don't mind i would like to post your review on another forum .
