Telling a great story isn’t easy, even if you have a formula to fall back on. It’s not about having the most unique puzzle pieces, but figuring out how they all fit together in a way that plays to your narrative’s core. For Gearbox’s new graphic adventureNew Tales From The Borderlandshowever, they’re still figuring out what that core actually is. Following up Telltale’s critically laudedTales From The Borderlandswas never going to be easy, but what’s profoundly frustrating about its (mostly) indirect sequel is how it struggles to lean into its greatest strengths.
The main complaint fans have leveled atGearbox’s internal effort at continuing the spin-off series is that it’s lost the spirit of the old series - except that’s not the case. For good or ill, New Tales is just as crass as the old Tales, with as many gut punches and silly one-liners as its predecessor. What holds it back isn’t lack of talent, but of focus. New Tales' direction changes wildly across its first three episodes, frantically scrambling for a core agenda for the player to chase after.
The only consistent thread is that three misfits - a scientist (Anu), her conman stepbrother (Octavio), and (Fran) the amorous owner of a frozen yogurt shop are all imperiled by the Tediore Corporation invading their home planet of Promethea. The CEO of Tediore, Susan Coldwell, makes it exceptionally personal for these three, warranting them to try and screw Tediore over to get their lives back on track.
It’s a reasonable starting premise, but not enough to support three meandering episodes of the characters trying to discern a way to achieve this goal. Then the last two episodes of the season effectively serve as one giant-sized episode once the story finally finds its footing.
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New Tales falls into the familiar struggles many a tabletop RPG dungeon master has gone through when a plot goes off the rails. Your party doesn’t follow the narrative you planned, their characters keep changing as the players get to grips with them, and you have to start cutting corners to keep any sort of pacing. It’s incredibly common among casual storytelling between friends, but rare to see in such a high-budget game. There are great, terrible, and ‘just alright’ stories in gaming, but rarely do you have something so inconsistent.
Fran’s constant flirting with Octavio may feel completely out of place, but Fran’s arc of overcoming her anger to find a healthy acceptance of her past mistakes is wonderfully written. There’s a certain sacrifice you can make late in the game which may well be the first instance of a true boss fight in a Telltale game, and a damn great one at that, but it also results in one of the worst endings afterward. Yet if you go for the alternative path with the best outcome, you have to endure one of the worst choreographed fights in the history of adventure games.
The flaws in the structure become more obvious the closer you examine various subplots. There’s an incredible rivalry between Octavio and a sentient gun named Brock, but it can only end one way, no matter your decisions. A teleporting robot is mostly used for plot conveniences instead of some major payoff like Loaderbot had in the first Tales. It’s heavily suggested Anu and another character could’ve had a romantic interest, only for that character to vanish for most of the season only to randomly appear in the final episode.
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Things get weirder the deeper you dig. The main impetus for Anu getting fired at the start of the game happens off-screen, yet there’s enough of an animation at the start of Episode One to suggest it might’ve been playable at one point. Even core mechanics like Octavio’s fancy wrist-computer scanning people or your party’s morale meter can vanish for whole chapters at a time. This isn’t ideal given there are fewer puzzles and action set-pieces than usual; in their place are minigames that are so hard to lose that you’d have to be actively trying to fail. I get that failstates are rare in this style of adventure game, but at least well choreographed QTEs felt satisfying to pull off. These are akin to being handed a baby’s raddle instead of an action figure with kung-fu grip.
Yet for all of this, there are also wonderfully meta moments, like a turn-based JRPG homage, or a knowing parody of the simplicity of Telltale puzzles so that the player doesn’t ever have to think too hard about their situation. The comedy can be outstanding too, such as a paranoid fighting game fan who serves as a recurring gag, and a sequence where everyone shooting each other is somehow one of the most lighthearted moments in the entire game. Anu’s inner growth sequence addresses themes of empathy with far greater complexity than you’d expect in a game where a man has to hold himself hostage to break out of the silliest prison ever.
you’re able to see a brilliant adventure game buried here. I’m not even sure you can properly score New Tales given how inconsistent everything is (thoughour James Dean certainly tried in his review). I can’t say for certain if it was ambitions outstretching resources or late-game rewrites, but somewhere along the line Gearbox clearly made sizable structural changes too late into production to iron them out. It’s an inherently flawed journey, one I can understand not everyone taking to. Yet in a weird way, it’s those incredibly human flaws that make New Tales endearing in spite of itself.
you’re able to see the storytellers behind the scenes striving to make an unforgettable experience - and theysort ofmanaged it. Riddled with indecisive design, scrambling to find focus, and lacking in refinement, New Tales is something exceedingly rare these days: a risk taken. There’s enough right here to make me believe the team behind this could nail their next effort, learning from all of this. If nothing else, it’s proof you need more than Telltale’s structure to take players on a great interactive journey.
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