#Tales from the borderlands rhys arm series#

Again, it’s pretty basic, but it’s far and away more interaction than you get in New Tales. You have dialogue choices really often, sometimes as many as three or four choices a minute, and you spend a good amount of time each episode exploring the environment and doing some point-and-click stuff. It’s baby stuff compared to full-on action games, but it might as well have been Breath of the Wild next to New Tales from the Borderlands. Something else that surprised me when I started Tales from the Borderlands is how often you interact with the game. I never understood the criticism of the “they will remember that” messages in the top corner of the screen, especially in regards to Tales. The Telltale devs get awesome mileage out of the mechanic, by constantly changing up how they use it for the sake of jokes, and, more sparingly, impactful emotional moments. Of course, you as a player are part of shaping that arc, and the game feels satisfying and reactive every step of the way.

#Tales from the borderlands rhys arm series#

As their goals slowly shift as the series go on, we can see who they are changing, in real-time, as they react to and deal with the circumstances that are placed in front of them. Right off the bat, we know exactly who the characters are and what they’re after. They don’t waste a second of my time, let alone hours at a time like another game I can think of. One particularly clever story technique they used a few times was having the characters lay out their plan, and then use that to narrate them actually carrying out those parts of the plan, which is just efficient writing in my opinion. Otherwise, the rest of the episodes are jam-packed with plans, obstacles, and random happenstances that send the group reeling, and then we have a blast seeing how they manage to scrape by and eventually come out on top. That sense of momentum is maintained throughout the entire rest of the series, except for maybe the last half of the final episode, which I can excuse because it makes way for the most video game-y section of Tales - the final boss fight. It just sets the tone for the entire series, the song is dripping with style and swag, and it really hammers home the feeling that there’s a whole adventure ahead of you. Then there’s the musical opening, and while all of them are particularly great (shout out to the slo-mo rocket launch sequence from episode 4 - the entirety of the penultimate episode is nothing short of excellent, honestly), but episode 1’s heavy beat and funky synth banger “Busy Earnin'” by Jungle is will be one of those gaming moments I remember for the rest of my life. There are still bits from this game that I quote to this day, and don’t even get me started on the finger guns fight in Episode 4. Compared to New Tales‘ slow, clunky exposition dumps, the original Tales’ sharp, focused writing is all the more noticeable. The dialogue is smart and snappy, and perfectly paced while also giving us exposition at the same time. The story gets rolling right away, and it never really slows down after that.

It opens with this mystery of who kidnapped Rhys, one of the player characters, and after a few quips, he launches into a narration of how he got to where he is in the first place. But the conclusion is the same, and it seems to be unanimous: Tales from the Borderlands is still one of the best stories ever told in a game.

New Tales from the Borderlands was so bad, it actually made more than one of us return to the original to make sure we hadn’t created some kind of false, reverent memory as a coping mechanism. Turns out Alice Bell over at Rock Paper Shotgun and I think alike, because she had the exact same idea. Before I even finished the first episode of New Tales, I knew I had to go back and see if the original held up in the way that I thought it did. The whole time I was playing, I couldn’t stop thinking about how awesome I thought the first game was, to the point that it is one of my favorite games of all time. Or maybe even better…Ī couple of weeks ago, I had the displeasure of reviewing Gearbox’s New Tales from the Borderlands. I try to give every game I review the benefit of the doubt, but this game just kept letting me down again and again and again, and in the end it turned out to be a pretty miserable experience - and I gave it a 3/10. Just go play it, because that’s basically the conclusion of this article, anyway. The following feature contains a spoiler for Telltale’s 2014 title Tales from the Borderlands.