Tales from the Borderlands

I went in expecting a competent-but-forgettable franchise tie-in and came out having replayed two episodes just to see alternate conversation branches. That surprised me. Tales from the Borderlands earns its 94% Steam rating the old-fashioned way: genuinely good writing in a genre that usually coasts on mediocre writing. The structure is classic Telltale. You swap control between two protagonists, Rhys, a mid-level Hyperion corp climber with a cybernetic eye used for scanning the environment, and Fiona, a Pandoran con artist with a hidden derringer and a talent for fast talk. The gimmick is that both characters are narrating the same events from their own biased perspectives, meaning the story interrupts itself, challenges its own facts, and wrings a lot of comedy out of the gap between what someone claims happened and what clearly did. It is a sharp structural choice that keeps the five episodes feeling fresher than a linear Telltale game would. Dialogue choices shape how other characters treat you, and while the final destination of the story stays roughly fixed, who survives and which relationships land warmly or sour is genuinely influenced by your decisions across all five chapters. The interaction toolkit is thin by design. You walk Rhys and Fiona around small explorable areas, scan objects with Rhys's cybernetic eye, collect cash scattered around environments that can serve as leverage or bribes at specific story beats, and react to QTE prompts during action sequences. None of that is demanding. The game sits firmly in the "interactive film" end of the adventure spectrum, and players who need the agency of a point-and-click puzzle game or the tension of a survival title will find it light. That is the honest trade-off: what you lose in mechanical depth you gain in pacing and laugh-per-hour ratio. The writing is considerably more nuanced than the mainline Borderlands games, and returning characters like Handsome Jack, repurposed here as an AI ghost living inside Rhys's head, are used well rather than just dropped in for applause. The technical side is where the age of the Telltale engine shows its wear. Movement can feel jittery, button prompts sometimes misalign with character animations, and a handful of scenes feel like the frame rate is struggling to keep pace with the action. None of it is a dealbreaker, but it is the consistent background noise of a 2014 engine doing its best. The five episodes are all available upfront in this package, which is the right way to experience a story that builds momentum across its runtime and lands one of the stronger finales in the Telltale catalog. Bottom line on audience fit: if you liked Telltale's Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us but wanted something lighter, this is the one. If you have never touched a Borderlands game, that is fine too. The game does enough setup that the universe is readable on its own terms. If you are here hoping for gunplay and looting, close the tab.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Tales from the Borderlands.