The Quill

I’ll keep this short. If you love the Borderlands series and/or TellTale’s episodic games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, you will love this one.

TellTale’s getting pretty good at narrating small episodic games that are fun.

The voice acting is great, the plot is interesting and the visuals are simple yet nice.

Borderlands as a franchise has a very rich world to draw from and TellTale are right at their home cooking new stories from its ingredients.

Pandora looks inviting and ripe for exploring. The characters themselves are messed up losers that cant seem to stop in-fighting that will just win your heart. The music is solid stuff.

The game is damn funny so i personally loved this one. That said, this game is not for everyone. Like all of TellTale’s offerings the gameplay mechanics are very simplistic if not none-existent at all and the choices you make don’t give you the impression they impact anything of worth later on.

They tried to introduce new gameplay ‘elements’ but i was not sold. For instance the game has now two main protagonists but so did The Walking Dead indirectly in season one. There is also some drop looting and fighting, but really they are just spruced up visual candy more than new gameplay elements in my book. What i was sold tho was the crazy plot, explosive setting and psychotic characters!

In many ways this and other games from TellTale are more like mini interactive animated movies than full games. There is no action here apart from the quick time events and no adventuring nor exploring apart from the very small and few in between rooms you get to ‘explore’. There is no puzzle element nor difficulty element as well. I do prefer if the gameplay was a bit better than this but we need to remember that each game season gives you around 10 hours of fun playtime and costs way less than AAA titles on launch so its an acceptable compromise.

Since i liked this game i recommend it to all fans of TellTale games specifically and Borderlands fans in general. I found it a short fun trip that left me wanting to know more since it doesn’t recycle any of the story ideas from others games giving us new laughs, situations and plots. But the limited gameplay mechanics may be honestly off putting for many gamers who might be expecting something more interactive and challenging than this one.

All said and done, can’t wait for the next episode !