Release Date: 27/08/2020
Played On: XBO
Available On: Win / XBO
Time Played: 9h 52m
Progress: Completed
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
When I finished playing Life Is Strange 2, I didn't really have much to say that I hadn't already touched on when I wrote about the first game. While the story was something new, everything else was just more of the same, including the nauseating and oh-so-hip characterisations that kept me at arm's length for the entire game. However, now Dontnod are back with their latest take on the formula that has kept them going for a while. Could this be a breath of fresh air, or just another dredge through niche cultural hipster life?
I suppose the short answer is that Tell Me Why actually manages to be both of those things at once. There's no doubt that this is a Dontnod game as it contains everything that we've come to expect from their style and their stories, but it does feel like they've learned a few lessons along the way. The first of which is one that I was super thankful to discover, which was the episodic release schedule.
Instead of the usual five or six episodes released months apart, Tell Me Why saw its episodes sent out into the world with only a week between each update. What's more, there were only three episodes that made up the entire story, so we knew from release day that everything would be over within a month. It might still seem like a month is a long enough time, but I am sick of episodic release schedules that can take anywhere up to a couple of years to complete. For that reason alone, this was a welcomed changed to the schedule, although it did leave me wondering why it was given the episodic treatment in the first place.
With the quick release schedule, all the episodes must have been completed before the first ever came out. At the very least, they could have waited three weeks or so and released everything at once, which would have made more sense to me and been a welcomed change to the formula. While I understand that splitting a story into episodes can be an effective narrative device, I don't think that Tell Me Why benefited at all from the broken delivery. Although, this is a minor gripe that I could aim at most episodic games, so let's move on and leave that one as it is.
For the most part, I did enjoy Tell Me Why and its story, which I felt was better handles than the Life Is Strange series. It appears that Dontnod have a couple of obsessions that they like to include in all their games, like the magical realism that seems to be a thread in everything they've released. These "unrealistic" elements are actually what I enjoy most about these games, as it brings a bit of intrigue and unreliability that the stories themselves fail to accomplish.
In fact, the focus of their stories is the other thing that Dontnod seem to be obsessed by. Everything up until now has focused on niche. teenage, middle-American experiences, with an added dash of some kind of sub-culture thrown into the for good measure. Of course, this isn't a bad thing in itself, as stories that focus on niche elements and minority experiences can be some of the most fascinating to encounter. Unfortunately for Dontnod though, they're focusing very heavily on scenarios that I have had a hard time relating to and empathising with.
Life Is Strange fell apart because everything about being a young girl at college seemed forced and fake to me. It might have been an accurate portrayal of the American school experience, but it was so foreign to my own culture that the whole thing seemed to have a sheen of falseness. Plus, it didn't help that the writing was so earnest and often extremely try-hard, so I was put off right from the start. It was only when the last act of the game hit with all its fantastical surrealism that I actually found myself getting invested.
The same can be said for Life Is Strange 2, and now it also applies to Tell Me Why, which had probably been the best story telling in this series of games yet, but it still falls in some deep holes along the way. It's unfortunate because I can see that the writing is trying really hard to tell a story that's cemented in its environment and contextualised by it deeply. There's no doubt that the settings we find ourselves in with these games have as much of a part to play as the characters themselves. Sadly though, you can try and push small-town-America to me all you want, but unless you're actually explaining what you mean, I have no idea what you're hinting at.
Tell Me Why takes its foot off the gas a little when it comes to the setting, as it focuses more on its characters returning to their family home for the first time in years. The sense of displacement that comes from having moved on and lived something of a life comes across well, but mostly because of tragic events that are central to the game's plot.
I'll try and avoid any spoilers for anything that isn't covered in the first scenes of the game, but essentially there are these two kids whose mother died when they were young. One of them killed her in self-defence and was sent to a detention centre for the remainder of their childhood. The game starts when Tyler is released from detention and picked up by his twin sister Alyson and driven back to their home town, and to the family home where the tragic murder happened so many years ago.
Suffice to say that the twins have a lot of stuff to sort out and a lot to catch up on. Not least of all is going through their old house and discovering a lot of otherwise unknown information about their mother and what had driven her to try and harm her children. For the remainder of the game we will meet a range of characters with their own take on events and their own opinions on the twins, leaving us to question just what did happen so many years ago and how has it changed this small town of diverse inhabitants.
To add to the confusion of past events, we learn early on that Tyler is trans, and had been born one of two twin girls. As we piece together the story, we start to learn that Tyler's transition was not welcomed by everyone in the town, and some even went out of their way to try and do something about it. We're unclear of how the twins' mother felt about her child's transition, which ends up being somewhat central to the unfolding plot, but in what felt like a natural and realistic way.
In fact, one of the greatest achievements of Tell Me Why could well be how they told their story that included a lead character who happens to be trans. This is touchy subject matter at times, so I was pleased to see that Tyler's character wasn't some kind of pastiche virtue signalling in order to add a bit of diversity to the game. While his transition does play a part in the overall narrative, it's far from central to the plot and can often be ignored completely. I am of the opinion that the best thing you can do with a character that represents an often persecuted minority, is to have everyone else treat them like they're any other character, thus normalising the difference that could otherwise become a point of contention. Too often we see characters paraded in front of their audience so we can all gawk at how different they are, so it's always nice to have a characters like this treated as mundane and "regular" as anyone else in the scene.
Of course, we need to have something magical for a Dontnod game, and Tell Me Why is no different. The twist this time around is that the twins are able to share thoughts and communicate telepathically with one another. This means that they can discuss things silently, but it also means that they can share their individual perspectives of the world with each other. This latter part becomes an important core to the gameplay in Tell Me Why, as we're often asked to interpret each twins' memories and scrutinise the differences between the two.
While exploring the game world as either Tyler or Alyson, certain prompts will appear that indicate a memory that's available to revisit. If we focus on the memory, a scene will play out in front of us, recalling something that happened in the past, in that location. It could be as simple as a time when the twins were playing in their living room, or it could hold key pieces of information that are essential to unlocking the plot.
After all, the whole game is geared towards the twins revisiting their past and trying to figure out what happened when they were young. Something had to happen that drove their mother to want to harm them, but they've spent so many years putting it out of their minds that the memories are a bit hazy, and even manage to contradict each other. Many scenes will present memories that change as we view them from each of the twins' perspectives, and it's left up to the player to decide which one is correct. This is probably where the game fell apart for me, as the choices and differences between memories only served to show how arbitrary our choices actually are.
One of the systems that constantly appears during the game is one about how strong the bond is between the twins. Certain actions and decisions will result in a little icon appearing that indicates whether their bond has been strengthened or weakened as a result of that action. It's a lot like seeing "so-and-so will remember that" in a TellTale game, as it indicates that your actions will have consequences later in the game.
Except that I found this "bond" system only serving to force me into decisions that I didn't agree with anyway. For instance, after the twins' mother dies, Tyler is shipped off to detention for committing the crime, while Alyson is adopted by the police chief who investigated the case. Within moments of Tyler meeting the police chief, Alyson is confronted with a choice to either side with her adopted father who has raised her for the last ten years or so, or her brother who she hasn't seen for the same amount of time. I thought it was more realistic to back up my step-father and defend him because he seemed like an okay guy, and Tyler was throwing childish accusations at him because he didn't know him. However, the game seemed to punish me for not agreeing with my twin, because it flashed up a bright icon that said I was losing my bond with my brother.
Now, I know that these games are meant to be based on choices and they're meant to have different outcomes that depend on what you choose as a player. The problem is when you make a choice and it doesn't seem to line up with the consequences that follow. As far as I could see in my playthrough, Tyler was being unreasonably defensive and overly sensitive, so I wanted to reassure him that the police chief was a good dude. Except what I thought would bring us closer together, ended up making us argue and lose our bond a little more. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that when you have a game that relies on choice so heavily, it doesn't serve you well when the results of those choices fail to make sense.
Considering that the entire game is built on this premise, it did manage to ruin the experience for me a little bit. It meant that instead of playing Tell Me Why as an interesting narrative where we discover the past, I ended up trying not to "mess up" and selecting the answers that were going to give me the outcome I wanted. Perhaps that's my own fault for not just going with what I honestly wanted to do, but it's hard to choose what you want, when you know the result won't be what you were intending.
Hence why Tell Me Why ends up being a bit of a mixed bag in the series of Dondnod games, as it's simultaneously an improvement and more of the same. I thought the writing was much better this time around, as It didn't try too hard to show us how realistic it could be. While Life Is Strange couldn't wait to name-drop regional nuances, and shove in some age-appropriate lingo, I was pleased to find that Tell Me Why focuses more on its story than trying to sell its setting to you.
Sadly though, there are still the trappings of a game that can't shut up about how much choice you have, only to later reveal that there wasn't all that many options all along. I suppose the saving grace is that this was only a three part series, so I never felt like it outstayed its welcome.
I think that's the shining achievement of Tell Me Why, which isn't really anything to laud it for and get excited about. However, I managed to enjoy myself with the game and by the time I was done, I was ready to be finished. If this had dragged out for another couple of episodes, I think it would have only served to frustrate me more and the cracks would have only widened. Thankfully though, the length seemed to serve the story well instead of the other way round, so by the time the final credits rolled I was still a happy camper.
Now if only Dontnod could apply their narrative style and beautiful design skills to something with a little more bite, I might want it to go on for much longer indeed. Up until now they've been toying with hyper-real scenarios that involve an edge of the surreal to keep things interesting, but I'd like to see them go hard in one direction or the other. Give me the ultra-realism that's often presented in these games, or open it up entirely to some mind-bending tricks of unreal space and time. I feel like we've all seen enough of this middle-ground magical realism by now and could do with something a bit more daring to sink our teeth into.
Then again, expectations and desires are often at odds with each other and I suspect that Dontnod's next game will be another hipster affair where young disenfranchised people listen to emotional acoustic guitar music. I'd even put a tenner on it.