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.
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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