Back to the Future The Game

Back to the future. Not the first TellTale game I’ve played. I started with Walking Dead and stopped on Batman. So I have a bit of experience with their games. My favorite being the Jurassic Park one. So when I started to play this one, which is to say one of TT’s earlier games, I said to myself it’ll probably take around an hour or two to get through the first episode. Oh how wrong I was. Least I learned that earlier TT games were more into quest than interactive movie. And by quest I mean 3D Sam & Max type of quest. Don’t get me wrong I like quests. Plot and scenes are majestic in quest type of games. But I hate, absolutely bloody hate the “look in the developer’s brain to find the solution+pixel hunting” type of quests which are like 99.9% of them. And “Back To The Future” is trying quite hard to be this kind of game. 

 Right so let’s speak a little bit about the gameplay of BTTF.  Thing like “X will remember this” and QTE (Dunno about this I’m still only halve episode in) is not in TT games so we can breathe a sigh of relief. So gameplay consists of three main parts which are cut scenes, walking and solving part, dialog. We also have inventory where we can examine or attempt to use an item on something. There is also a hint part and thank god for that system. Even though it doesn’t always help you but it tries. Sounds okay? Maybe for someone with more of a creative brain than mine. See, I already have 2-3 moments that made me swear loudly. Those moments are: getting Doc’s book away from Biff. God I bloody hate him, I know he's supposed to be annoying bloody irritating character but they could’ve toned it down a little. Second moment is where you need to record young Emmet’s mumbling. The bloody thing won’t activate properly and I instead would just bump into him and activate the dialog. I still don’t know how I did it. The third is when you have to get a barrel of bootleg alcohol from the Soup Kitchen.  How the flop did I suppose to know that I need to hit the pipe in another place and not the same place where Cue Ball was hitting it? Then I was guessing “why do we need our grandpa’s hat” completely forgetting Einstein exists but that’s on me. Rest of the episodes are going to be a mess for me.

Whatever, let’s just move to the plot. Timeline is after the third movie. Doc hasn’t been in his house for a season. So local bank decided to sell off Doc’s belongings to pay his bills.  While Marty had an ominous dream and decides to find where Doc's gone off. That’s where the DeLorean self-drives right to the house. Marty walks out to greet Doc but only find his dog Einstein inside. Poking around the car we find Doc’s tape recorder where he says that car will automatically go back to the 1986 to the Doc’s residence in case he messes up something. So one annoying figuring out session after (We had to deal with miss Enda I forgot her surname) and we find that Doc got himself killed by mobsters in 1932 So we go there some time before the tragic incident to prevent it. But Doc also got in jail so we need to get him out of it too. Sigh…. I like the plot and how story is going but figuring out part probably going to sour my experience even further. Still it’s good if you wanna see how TT was before they “casualized” their product.