The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Finally, due to a really complicated series of me feeling like shit, I got back to Back to the Future! This always happens with Telltale games. I’ll play the first episode immediately, then not touch them again until they’re almost all out. Oh well.

Episode 2, Get Tannen!, was kind of a letdown.

Some of the design decisions they made to make the game “easier” to understand for non-gamers really bothered me. Mostly the movement. The game revolves around the Hill Valley town square, much like all the movies and such. It’s a three dimensional space. However, the game basically has this space set up as a straight line. There are invisible paths that Marty has to follow as he walks around. This makes it so that you can never use the straightest line to get from one destination to another to cut down on travel time. This is really frustrating after awhile. I didn’t notice it in the first episode because of Cara’s influence, which is fine enough, but goodness.
The other big problem that stuck out to me was the “Goals” thing. There was a long time where the “Goal” the game was showing me was something I had already accomplished, which seems… stupid, since it could have been telling me something else I should have been working on. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having it!

The plot, too, was just not very exciting. None of it didn’t make sense, you understand: it’s a fine premise that Marty’s grandpa would get killed due to what happened in the first episode, as well as Kid Tannen going free and changing the future. Having to change that is all well and good. However, it really was interacting with the same people in basically the same locations as the first episode, which was really sort of a shame. It felt like some of the earlier Sam and Max episodes in that respect, where they added one new location and little else to the overall formula. Telltale had mostly gotten away from that, I thought. It was a bit of a letdown.

Finally, and I know this is just kind of a contradictory thing, but many of the puzzles in the game just seemed too… puzzle-y. In the first episode, there was only one puzzle that was really an adventure game puzzle. Everything else was more talking with people and making stuff happen, which fits more with the property and more casual aim of the game. There were many more adventure game puzzles here, and some of them just screamed of puzzle. The box of sheet music in incredibly plain view just yelled out PUZZLE and I found myself solving it before I even knew why I needed to. That’s just really unfortunate.

I’m being a bit hard on it, though. It’s not that bad, perse. They did make you feel more like a time-traveller, as you get to jump around a bit in time (not freely, but when the story dictates) in order to make the changes necessary to fix what was messed up in time, which is cool. The voice actor for Marty is still pretty amazing as well. It just wasn’t a very strong second episode, is all I’m saying.