Posted in: Games, Movies | Tagged: entertainment, games, Tales From The Borderlands

Tales From The Borderlands' Smooth Steps In Interactive Storytelling – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

2014 has been a bumper year for Tellttale Games, with season 2 of The Walking Dead game released a few months ago, now the first chapter of Tales from The Borderlands this past week and the first chapter of the Game of Thrones prequel coming up.

I was sent a review code for the first episode of Tale from the Borderlands last week and played through it like you would watch the first episode of a new TV series. Tales from the Borderlands is a spinoff and quasi-sequel to the Borderlands game series. Those games were First Person Shooters with an RPG element where you played an adventurer in a Mad Max-style dystopian planet shooting everything in sight to get better guns, loot and upgrade your character's superpowers. There was always a potentially interesting world and story all the shooting, but it took a backseat to the shooting and killing. Tales from the Borderlands pushes the world and the story to the front as you play characters who aren't badass vault-hunters but two of the normal people scraping to stay alive and get ahead in that world.

There's Rhys, a corporate tool screwed out of his promotion who comes to Pandora to get back at his new boss by screwing him out of a major deal.

There's Fiona, a hard-scrapping con artist working on a big score with her sister.

Of course, Rhys and Fiona are thrown together in classic screwball comedy manner as they have to work together to salvage their big scores and also stay alive, predictably forming a grudging respect and friendship along the way.

While the game doesn't invent the storytelling wheel, it does refine Telltale Games' storytelling and interactive gameplay controls to their most polished yet. The writing is consistently clever in its plotting, twists and reversals and does something not many other movies, let alone games, manage to do well, which is an engaging comedy farce. Where The Walking Dead games hooked you emotionally with a sympathetic character trying to make the best decisions to take care of a little girl, Tales from the Borderlands takes that pressure and stress off by emphasising comedy. There aren't that many pressures to what choices you have Rhys and Fiona make. You can make Rhys a complete douchebag or a slightly less douche-y guy who at least cares about his best friend, and you can choose to make Fiona a nervous grafter on the verge of panic or cucumber-cool as she tries to bluff her way out of danger.

There's also a polish in the camerawork, editing and pacing compared to Telltales' previous games. It feels more cinematic than ever and there's far less awkwardness in the way the characters are placed when you have to move them across the screen. I think there's even more polish in the way the Quick Time Events – the bane of video games design – were made here. Unlike other reviewers, this is the first game where I didn't fail any of the QTEs, making the story feel extremely seamless for me as I get the characters through the fairly creative action sequences where they had to time their actions and survive by the skin of their teeth.

I've seen a lot of reviewers for the game mention "intereactive movie" in the last few days. I'd been thinking about that a lot lately when it comes to certain games. We're getting to the point of games overtaking movies as the premier form of narrative entertainment for kids and twentysomethings now, and more and more high-end games are making stories a priority. Telltale Games have taken the point-and-click adventure game and combined it with storytelling designs we know from companies like Bioware to create games that are interactive stories, stripping away shooting and combat mechanics so that the gameplay is concentrated on storytelling and different narrative and paths. This is an interesting model in storytelling because players – the audience – have to actively push the main characters and choose their responses in order to push the story forward. It's not passively being presented with a story as a movie or TV show does since it requires the input of the audience. I don't suggest this is the future of commercial pop storytelling, but it's certainly one new avenue that's on the rise.

A review copy of Tales from the Borderlands was provided to Bleeding Cool for review purposes. QTEs at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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