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More action-oriented gamers might find this too meta, or a bit frustrating and underwhelming, but to me it’s a thoughtful set-up that suits the story. Your job is both to unravel the mystery, and to decide the twins’ future: your choices matter not only because they determine what happens next in a choose-your-own-adventure sense, but also they collectively govern the relationships that the twins have with each other and other townspeople – for example, the trust between the pair grows when they validate each other’s memories.

The game mechanism draws on the idea of unreliable memory as you choose whose version of events to believe while you dig into the family’s backstory. Photograph: Dontnod EntertainmentĪs with Life is Strange, the protagonists of Tell Me Why wield a supernatural power – in this case, it’s a telepathic bond that also enables them to access vivid shared memories as well as conflicting ones. Not everything is about them or their goals, and Tyler being trans is a formative part of his story but not the sum of his character.Īs a player, your job is both to unravel the mystery and to decide the twins’ future. There are a couple of moments where the characters are a little too emotionally upfront or verge on preachy, but it all goes towards building the story: after all, who among us has not been lectured by an ecologically minded young man about declining fish stocks? For the most part, the side narratives about Tlingit culture, environmental sustainability, queer Alaska and the juvenile justice system are genuinely interesting, and they also help situate the siblings and their shared trauma in a multidimensional world.

Illustrator Florence Guittard has done a remarkable job with the whimsical fairytale imagery of the book, which is distinct from the rest of the game’s more cinematic aesthetic.ĭontnod’s Life is Strange series deals with sexual assault, immigration racism and police brutality, and Tell Me Why doesn’t shy away from real-world problems either, but here the storytelling feels more subtle and mature. One notable highlight is the Book of Goblins, a codex of stories that the twins wrote with their mother when they were kids, which forms a sort of parallel fantasy world that also harbours clues for puzzles in the present day. Tell Me Why doesn’t shy away from real-world problems, but the storytelling feels subtle and mature.

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