Their stories are slowly joined with a patience that felt novelistic, in that the script was confident enough about each thread to take its time before weaving them together. How New Tales From the Borderlands’ story will be like ‘4D chess’ Fran appears to us in a moment of quotidian frustration that sends her spiraling toward unreasonable heights of anger that I, as a player, chose to embrace throughout the game. Octavio is presented alongside LOU13, a robotic assassin who, for whatever reason, needs to hear your full name before shooting you in the head. Anu is shown in a high-stress scenario that establishes her commitment to animal rights right before a dramatic confrontation between two feuding corporations takes center stage. 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.
The three are joined by ancillary characters along the way, but their relationships with one another form the central thrust, narratively and mechanically, of New Tales. Fran, finally, is Octavio’s friend and onetime employer, an overtly sexual frozen yogurt purveyor with anger issues.
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). Sister-brother pair Anu and Octavio are obvious foils. You control a trio: Anu, Octavio, and Fran.
Though developed by Gearbox and not Telltale Games, if you’ve played any of these branching narrative games, you’ll feel at home here. New Tales From the Borderlands is, per its name, a spiritual successor to Tales From the Borderlands. You might not like all of the jokes (I, for one, did not care for a particular fart joke), but by golly, there are enough of them here that some just have to land. In the roughly 10 hours it took me to complete the game, I lost count of the pop culture references somewhere between Babe and OnlyFans. Its script, excellently delivered by the game’s voice cast, maintains a cadence of jokes that rivals Veep for sheer frequency. New Tales From the Borderlands is eager to please.
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