New Tales From the Borderlands review: Charming characters, no room to breathe

Tales from the Borderlands:The game is eager and willing to please. Its script, excellently delivered by the game’s voice cast, maintains a cadence of jokes that rivals VeepBecause of its sheer frequency. It was a tedious 10 hour process. BabeOnlyFans. While you may not love all the jokes, (I for one did not find one of my fart jokes funny), there are plenty of them. HaveTo land.

Tales from the BorderlandsIts name refers to a spiritual successor Stories from the Borderlands. Though developed by Gearbox and not Telltale Games, if you’ve played any of these branching narrative games, you’ll feel at home here. The trio you control are Anu, Octavio and Fran. Anu and Octavio, a sister-brother couple, are clear foils. Anu is an anxious scientist who abhors animal testing and violence of all kinds; Octavio, by contrast, sits comfortably in the lovable buffoon archetype, insisting that he is street smart to Anu’s book smart (though the evidence for those purported smarts is thin). Fran, finally, is Octavio’s friend and onetime employer, an overtly sexual frozen yogurt purveyor with anger issues. There are ancillary characters that accompany them, but their interactions with one another forms the core narrative and mechanical thrust. New Tales.

Gearbox Software/2K Games

The first of five episodes — and the game’s best, to my taste — does an excellent job of introducing these three in their own separate tracks. Anu is presented in an extremely stressful scenario where she demonstrates her dedication to animal rights. Then, a confrontation takes place between rival corporations. Octavio, along with LOU13 (a robotic assassin) is shown. LOU13 needs to know your full name in order to shot you in the face. Fran is in an uncharacteristic moment of frustration and spirals toward the extremes of anger she has never experienced.

They are gradually joined together with a novelistic patience. The script is confident enough in each thread to allow it time before weaving them all together. Episode 1 ends with the gang all together, as one would expect, but crucially, besides some shared history between individuals, they’re still getting to know one another.

At least until episode 2 starts, at which point we’re treated to a montage (set to great music) showing the central cast plus LOU13 hanging out and wordlessly bonding, culminating in them doing the wave. It’s a funny, absurd image, but once you retake control of the characters after the music video, the group has its own dynamic: Fran, who had just met Anu when we last saw her, is now comfortable making the same kind of quips about the scientist’s overthinking tendencies as her own brother does. The first chapter was patient with its characters and plotting (especially in light of the loud Borderlands theme), but the second felt too easy, almost as though these characters knew each other for their entire lives.

Gearbox Software/2K Games

Although this may sound strange, it could be true. In this genre, the main driver of gameplay is narrative. Telltale’s games have the player playing the part of a fiction writer creating his first draft. This requires the player to make intuitive decisions regarding the character’s actions and motivations. These decisions are the most important. New Tales, where non-narrative segments usually take the form of: unsatisfying (though skippable) hacking minigames; an action-figure/fighting-game mishmash that plays exactly the same the seventh time as it does the first; or setting the player down in a location where they can walk around and interact with people, objects, and the occasional trash bag with money in it. This is Borderlands after all.

Ultimately, New TalesCharacters and plots suffer from issues with pacing. Team cohesion is introduced as a mechanic that affects story beats, but by the time I’d failed my first behind-the-scenes dice roll, resulting in the death of a cute, doglike character (OK, dog-Ish), I struggled to see when and where I’d gone wrong with my interactions in the short amount of time I’d been given.

Episode 3, which is admittedly entertaining, loses its steam. Shark TankOnly to rush into episode 5, which saw significant character deaths and several narrative developments that were less fleshed-out. Fran suffers from both genuinely hilarious interactions and an overreliance of playing up her sexuality to make the episode funny, particularly for someone who is attracted to many genders. A slow-burning joke about a hoverchair mode that causes bloodshed in her childhood are great bits. But they get overshadowed often by jokes about how much she enjoys sex.

Gearbox Software/2K Games

However, there are plenty of jokes in the game. It’s quick and funny, with well-crafted dialogue. And when jokes do hit, they really hit. In particular, I found a recurring gag of a soldier you keep finding in freezers, morgues, and ventilation shafts to be consistently hilarious in a Gene Parmesan kind of way, and I’ll be laughing for weeks at Fergus, an unpaid, Chippendales-esque intern who dances to a song called “Free Labor,” which, it turns out, are the only words he knows, like a Hodor of late capitalism.

Anu and Octavio’s journey as brother and sister had some real highs, too, but in the path I took through the story, it got overwhelmed by some of the game’s more magical elements, shunting quiet, emotional conversations aside to accomplish more traditionally dramatic video game plot things involving shards and glowing green energy. The game was enjoyable to me. Tales from the Borderlands:Its characters. It was only that their stories were a bit longer.

Tales from the Borderlands: On Oct. 21, the game will be available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (Windows PC), Xbox One (Xbox One), and Xbox Series X. 2K Games provided a prerelease code for the game. The PC review was conducted using that code. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions from products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.