At its core, [i]I Know a Tale[/i] is a sound Hidden Object Game (HOG) with nice artwork and some Full Motion Video (FMV), but I can't recommend it because of its awful English translation and severe lack of actual puzzles.
[h1]Story and writing/translation[/h1]
You are a sheriff who's dispatched to a robbery taking place at the home of a local collector of archaeological curiosities. When you arrive at the scene, you find the robbers turned to stone and the collector behaving strangely before he runs off.
The story of [i]I Know a Tale[/i] is paper-thin. There is one 'twist' in the story, but everyone who has looked at the game's logo in the Steam Store will have seen it coming.
On top of that, the writing is just awful. I've seen translations made with Google Translate that were of better quality than the lines I've read in [i]I Know a Tale[/i]. And I'm not even kidding or exaggerating. Instead of "[i]You need…[/i]", the game insists on writing "[i]There is not enough…[/i]". So you'll read close to a hundred statements like "[i]There is not enough a key[/i]" and "[i]There is not enough part of the figures[/i]" (meaning parts of a figurine). The writing or the translation is so bad that some of the lines are borderline gibberish, for example: "[i]There is interesting that there is at the bottom of the well[/i]".
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
To start playing, you select one of two difficulty modes. The only real difference between them is whether or not you want to see an occasional sparkle to indicate interactable objects in each scene.
Gameplay consists of HOGs' classic first-person point-and-click adventuring and solving puzzles, most notably the genre's titular 'Hidden Objects Puzzles' (HOPs). Unfortunately, there are very few puzzles in [i]I Know a Tale[/i].
You only get a handful of HOPs. Admittedly, [i]I Know a Tale[/i] throws a whole new type of HOP into the mix, which is always a nice touch. It's a HOP that doesn't show you a list of items to find in a scene, but instead a number of items slowly 'fade in and out of existence', so you need to look for subtle changes in the scene.
Besides the handful of HOPs, there are just a few other puzzles and none of them pose a challenge. They mostly require copying some symbols or an image by rotating and placing puzzle pieces where they belong (a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, really).
The point-and-click adventuring is okay, although [i]I Know a Tale[/i] does have a few frustrating moments when the next step is either unlogical or it requires using an item on a very small spot of an object. So you may "[i]need something sharp[/i]" when you have a perfectly good dagger in your inventory that for some reason won't cut it (pun intended). Or you may think you've already tried to use an item on a particular object and it didn't work, but through trial and error you find out you do need to use that very same item on that very same object, just a tiny bit more to the left or right from where you tried clicking earlier.
[h1]Graphics and music[/h1]
As you can tell from the screenshots on the store page, the artwork of [i]I Know a Tale[/i] looks very nice and colourful.
Most of the music is also top-notch, adding to the mysterious atmosphere the game is going for. I don't mean to insult anyone here but while playing, I sometimes thought the music sounded so much better than the general production level of [i]I Know a Tale[/i], that I think they just copied the score from elsewhere (another game or what have you). I may be mistaken, of course.
[h1]FMV and voice acting[/h1]
The roles of the two robbers, the collector, his daughter and a helpful fisherman are acted out in FMV. The graphical quality of the FMV is top-notch. However, everything else with it is terribly wrong.
I'm an FMV afficionado and I'm very lenient when it comes to the quality of the acting in games that boast FMV as an art style (the acting is even [i]supposed[/i] to be cheesy!), but in the case of [i]I Know a Tale[/i], the acting is just plain bad.
In addition, the dialogue is dubbed very badly in English, in two ways: the actors are clearly saying something completely different from what you hear through your speakers (worst lip syncing ever, they clearly didn't even bother to try), and the voice acting is cringeworthily awful. Also, the voices of the voice actors don't fit the type of live actor who played the character.
The bottom line is, [i]I Know a Tale[/i]'s whole FMV 'experience' is the worst I've ever seen, and I've been seeking out FMV games since the 1990s.
[h1]On Steam's extra features[/h1]
[i]I Know a Tale[/i] has 5 Steam Trading Cards. You'll get 3 while running the game. As the game isn't very popular, its trading cards are rare, so the price for the cards is pretty steep (up to 50 cents a piece).
The game has no Steam Achievements.
