Back to the Future - The Videogame
Feb. 23rd, 2012 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73The game we finished this week: Back to the Future - The Videogame (Steam, $24.99)
Huz and I have always been fans of point-and-click adventure games. We've played all the modern entries in the Monkey Island series, all the Myst games, and the more recent two Sam and Max games with varying degrees of enjoyment. With an adventure game, the two aspects that really count for us are the story and the puzzles. It's rare to find a game that executes both aspects flawlessly; most of them are strong in one aspect or the other. Back to the Future is no exception to the rule, but its storytelling aspects are so good that I'm more than willing to forgive its gameplay/puzzle flaws.
The Back to the Future game picks up a year after the third movie in the series. With Doc Brown having been missing for several months and presumed dead, your first task in the role of Marty McFly is to try to prevent the contents of Doc's house from being sold off in an estate sale. Marty doesn't believe for an instant that Doc is actually dead, and of course neither should the player. And indeed, once Marty completes his initial tasks, he's off on a time-traveling adventure in the faithful Delorean to 1931. Through the five episodes of the game, you'll play mostly in Marty's shoes as he tries to keep the timestream consistent with the 1986 he knows.
TellTale Games made an interesting choice in designing the puzzles for Back to the Future. A large majority of them involve Marty setting up the environment and the people in it to have a particular outcome. Sometimes these work reasonably well (as in a rock guitar face-off with a challenger for his girlfriend Jen's affections is a pretty clever variation on Simon Says, in which you can use dance moves to knock over objects and change the environment), sometimes not so much (such as entirely random-feeling case of running back and forth around a vehicle trying to trap a Tannen inside it). And sometimes you can see what appears to be an obvious action to solve an overall situation but it's completely unclear what other actions you have to do first in order to be able to actually do those obvious actions. It's very definitely a mixed bag at best in terms of gameplay.
The story aspect, however, is really great. Christopher Lloyd reprises his role as Doc in the films, and while Michael J. Fox only comes in for a cameo appearance in the final episode (and it's a real joy to fans when it happens), A. J. LoCascio does an almost spookily perfect replicate of Fox's teenage voice from the movies. And as in other TellTale games, the main character has something to say about every clickable object, whether it's a brief description, a funny opinion, or a clue as to what to do with it, so it's well worth the player's time to click on everything. And the overall story arc is really good too. A new character, who develops and changes with - well, _time_ - makes the game feel properly cinematic. Marty and Doc change over time as well, and both the voice work and the animation convey real emotions. The very tag end of the story is not entirely satisfying, but it does end in a way that opens a very wide path for more games in the future.
Overall recommendation: Come for the fan service, stay for the story, and have a walkthrough handy for the occasionally overly dense or poorly designed puzzle.
Huz and I have always been fans of point-and-click adventure games. We've played all the modern entries in the Monkey Island series, all the Myst games, and the more recent two Sam and Max games with varying degrees of enjoyment. With an adventure game, the two aspects that really count for us are the story and the puzzles. It's rare to find a game that executes both aspects flawlessly; most of them are strong in one aspect or the other. Back to the Future is no exception to the rule, but its storytelling aspects are so good that I'm more than willing to forgive its gameplay/puzzle flaws.
The Back to the Future game picks up a year after the third movie in the series. With Doc Brown having been missing for several months and presumed dead, your first task in the role of Marty McFly is to try to prevent the contents of Doc's house from being sold off in an estate sale. Marty doesn't believe for an instant that Doc is actually dead, and of course neither should the player. And indeed, once Marty completes his initial tasks, he's off on a time-traveling adventure in the faithful Delorean to 1931. Through the five episodes of the game, you'll play mostly in Marty's shoes as he tries to keep the timestream consistent with the 1986 he knows.
TellTale Games made an interesting choice in designing the puzzles for Back to the Future. A large majority of them involve Marty setting up the environment and the people in it to have a particular outcome. Sometimes these work reasonably well (as in a rock guitar face-off with a challenger for his girlfriend Jen's affections is a pretty clever variation on Simon Says, in which you can use dance moves to knock over objects and change the environment), sometimes not so much (such as entirely random-feeling case of running back and forth around a vehicle trying to trap a Tannen inside it). And sometimes you can see what appears to be an obvious action to solve an overall situation but it's completely unclear what other actions you have to do first in order to be able to actually do those obvious actions. It's very definitely a mixed bag at best in terms of gameplay.
The story aspect, however, is really great. Christopher Lloyd reprises his role as Doc in the films, and while Michael J. Fox only comes in for a cameo appearance in the final episode (and it's a real joy to fans when it happens), A. J. LoCascio does an almost spookily perfect replicate of Fox's teenage voice from the movies. And as in other TellTale games, the main character has something to say about every clickable object, whether it's a brief description, a funny opinion, or a clue as to what to do with it, so it's well worth the player's time to click on everything. And the overall story arc is really good too. A new character, who develops and changes with - well, _time_ - makes the game feel properly cinematic. Marty and Doc change over time as well, and both the voice work and the animation convey real emotions. The very tag end of the story is not entirely satisfying, but it does end in a way that opens a very wide path for more games in the future.
Overall recommendation: Come for the fan service, stay for the story, and have a walkthrough handy for the occasionally overly dense or poorly designed puzzle.
