Telltale Games started out making light-hearted, funny games, but a few years ago things took a decidedly dark turn.
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No one would ever fault them turning to the creation of wonderful licensed games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but it certainly has made things dour. The Walking Dead Season 2, their latest release, is so crushingly depressing that it threatens to remove any happy memories we have of talking dogs and hyperkinetic rabbity things.
But never fear- Tales From the Borderlands is almost here. We played through the first half hour of the first (as-of-yet untitled) episode of the series and can report to you that the humor is back. Of course, this is pure Borderlands brand dark humor, retaining all the personality, familiar objects (loot? it’s here), and bloody violence from the game. Hell, it even retains the combat.
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You heard right. While you play two protagonists - Rhys and Fiona- who are Hyperion employees and don’t really know their way around a gun (let alone a gajillion guns), even in this first section of the game there’s an amazing, action-packed shootout to witness.
It happens while Rhys (Sam Witwick) is relating his story of how he stole a bunch of cash from Hyperion and headed to Pandora with his fellow employee and thief Vaughn (Chris Hardwick) to buy one of the much-sought after Vault Keys. They land and soon try to find directions to the meet-up, quickly learning that Pandora isn’t a very welcoming place after accidentally running over a Skag and then coming across a group of bandits.
They stupidly ask them for directions and the bandits take a keen interest in their fancy, Hyperion-branded clothes, as well as the handcuffed suitcase on Vaughn’s arm, which is full of cash for the exchange. Things soon go sour- even if you choose to keep referring to one particularly grimy Bandit as "Grease Face" (a familiar "Grease-Face Will Remember This" prompt will pop up in the corner). Thankfully Rhys has a trick up his sleeve, as he calls in a Loader Bot to even up the odds.
Here starts one remarkably entertaining and funny action scene, perhaps the best one Telltale has done yet. You can choose the loadout for your bot as you’re cowering in cover, load it with rockets, machine guns, a shield, grenade launchers- whatever you like. The entire action sequence is different depending on your choices, although either way, the bandits get it.
When the Loader Bot lands it takes out one of the bandits in the process, squashing him into a bloody pulp.
“Angry eyes detected,” it intones as it rears up. It doesn’t do anything until you direct it to do such and then it’s just chaos.
“Lo I am become death, destroyer of bandits,” it remarks, among other wonderful one-liners, as it lays them to waste.
Destruction and a few QTEs that lets you utilize a shock-rod on bandits later, you manage to escape, but poor Loader Bot does not. You can choose to have him self-destruct and take out the remaining bandits or to escape and save himself, which results in Rhys getting a message from the company to report to HR about the property damage.
The demo was much the same as the one shown off at E3, with a few noticeable changes. After this great section you end up finding the contact you came to meet in the first place, although he soon smells something fishy and doesn’t want to send you the vault key. He starts to walk off and you’re given the typical Telltale choice- a this or that decision with a countdown. Here you can choose to get your vault key in one of two ways- using force or blowing his mind. Using force turns things into a shootout, which is what we were shown at E3. Blowing his mind is so much more satisfying, as Rhys delivers an impassioned, inspiring speech as music swells behind him. It’s absolutely goddamn hysterical.
The end of the demo leaves us with Fiona butting into the story and bringing us to the present by saying that this wasn’t the way things happened. How does she know? She was there.
She then relates what happened, making you realize that this game will be basically Borderlands: Rashomon. What's better, you are given four choices of what actually happened. “The Vault Hunter Showed Up” seemed the obvious choice, even though it was the same way from the E3 demo, and features X from Borderlands 2 showing up in typically stylized fashion.
The four choices offer completely different story points, although when we spoke with Telltale's Director of Public Relations Job Stauffer after the demo he said that the points wouldn’t necessarily change the course of the next four episodes- just that section of the game.
Either way, we're sold. The fact that this game exists at all is a bit of a miracle. The idea for it originally came about when Telltale and Gearbox ended up sitting next to each other at the Spike VGAs in 2012.
"We all had a lot of drinks and nine months later, the game was born," said Stauffer.
While the original Borderlands writers aren't penning this game (it's being written in-house), Telltale has the full approval from Gearbox and has been working with them on replicating their style and making sure the story fits. This is canon, and there will be deep references to parts of the Borderlands lore, including to the recently released Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
Stauffer also revealed that one of the actors might be receiving a new, well-known voice actor.
When asked about Telltale's future and the possibility of them doing more original titles, he said that Telltale wasn’t closed to it, but they have a ton of great partnerships now with companies like DC, WB, and HBO, and that they have proven that they can take established stories and do them in their own style.
It was nice to see them turning back to humor, I remarked, because it’s been a while since Telltale was funny. And after all, we next have Game of Thrones coming from them...
“Yeah, Game of Thrones is much lighter,” said Stauffer. “It’s actually a bunch of kids singing kumbaya.”
Expect Tales From The Borderlands to hit in the next few months, and to be one of the funniest games of the year.
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