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Tell me why2/20/2023 Given that it has been five years since Dontnod released the first episode of Life is Strange, I’m surprised that these cinematic, story-rich games haven’t had a bigger effect on wider screen culture. Now and then you wonder how things might have been different, and whether you can even trust your recollection of the past. Tyler’s transition is part of that, but so are countless other decisions: most of us have a running mental catalogue of the moments when our timeline seemed to bifurcate, when taking one path precluded taking another. As identical twins who have gone separate ways, Tyler and Alyson are an obvious split mirror. More action-oriented gamers might find this too meta, or a bit frustrating and underwhelming, but to me it’s a thoughtful set-up that suits the story. Your job is both to unravel the mystery, and to decide the twins’ future: your choices matter not only because they determine what happens next in a choose-your-own-adventure sense, but also they collectively govern the relationships that the twins have with each other and other townspeople – for example, the trust between the pair grows when they validate each other’s memories. The game mechanism draws on the idea of unreliable memory as you choose whose version of events to believe while you dig into the family’s backstory. Photograph: Dontnod EntertainmentĪs with Life is Strange, the protagonists of Tell Me Why wield a supernatural power – in this case, it’s a telepathic bond that also enables them to access vivid shared memories as well as conflicting ones. Not everything is about them or their goals, and Tyler being trans is a formative part of his story but not the sum of his character.Īs a player, your job is both to unravel the mystery and to decide the twins’ future. There are a couple of moments where the characters are a little too emotionally upfront or verge on preachy, but it all goes towards building the story: after all, who among us has not been lectured by an ecologically minded young man about declining fish stocks? For the most part, the side narratives about Tlingit culture, environmental sustainability, queer Alaska and the juvenile justice system are genuinely interesting, and they also help situate the siblings and their shared trauma in a multidimensional world. Illustrator Florence Guittard has done a remarkable job with the whimsical fairytale imagery of the book, which is distinct from the rest of the game’s more cinematic aesthetic.ĭontnod’s Life is Strange series deals with sexual assault, immigration racism and police brutality, and Tell Me Why doesn’t shy away from real-world problems either, but here the storytelling feels more subtle and mature. One notable highlight is the Book of Goblins, a codex of stories that the twins wrote with their mother when they were kids, which forms a sort of parallel fantasy world that also harbours clues for puzzles in the present day. The time will depend on how thorough you are as there are collectibles to find and some optional puzzles to complete that will score you some achievement points, but typically you will find most collectibles on your journey as you play.Tell Me Why doesn’t shy away from real-world problems, but the storytelling feels subtle and mature. This means that from start to end, you can expect a campaign of between 9 to 12 hours. The one-week gap between each chapter is designed to allow breathing space and thought processing from the events of each chapter, though you can of course choose to play as you wish. In terms of the length of the story, you are looking at between three and four hours per chapter, with three chapters overall. However, the whole game will be downloaded if you are playing after the release of the final chapter. If you are playing it on release, all of the game’s content will be available over the three weeks of the game’s release schedule. Thankfully, Dontnod has changed its approach for Tell Me Why, and instead, you will only have a week between each release chapter for the game. such as those developed by Telltale Games and Dontnod’s Life is Strange, balancing the content evenly across all of the game’s episodes can be a tough challenge, usually hamstrung by time constraints that can see significant time between the release of episodes. While you want to offer a fantastic adventure for fans, you also want to make sure that you’re offering value for money with the amount of content available.įor episodic games. When it comes to story and character driven games, crafting a tale without any padding is a difficult task.
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