The other popular form that’s emerging though is the episodic adventure game. One of the more recent is Back to the Future Season 1, which I got the chance to download thanks to some sales on Steam. It’s certainly not the first of its kind. It comes from Telltale games, makers of other great episodic franchises such as Sam and Max and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People.
Where Back to the Future is concerned, I am a pretty darn big fan. It was one of my favourite movies growing up, even moreso than Ghostbusters, and even its jokes and concepts still hold up today. Normally when it comes to game adaptations of movies, I get nervous and worried and usually am right to be so. But when I heard this was in the hands of Telltale Games, I was pretty confident they'd deliver. Thankfully, I was right.
Since each episode is fairly small in length (about 2-3 hours of gameplay per episode) and they don’t really differ in terms of gameplay, I’m just going to discuss all of them as a whole rather than each separately. Keep in mind as well that I played these games all together as opposed to waiting two months for each episode, so my experience is a bit of a different one.
As the game opens, you hear the familiar soundtrack start up and the very familiar scene from the first movie starts to play out as Doc introduces his time machine while Marty records the Delorean. At first, it seems like the game is either going to follow the events of the first movie or change the events of the first movie, but after a couple of minutes you realize that this is not the plot but a flashback/ominous dream sequence.
Marty wakes up safe in his bed and you find out that it’s several months after the events of the third movie. Doc Brown is nowhere to be found, due to his having married Clara and gone gallivanting around through time, and Marty is starting to miss him something fierce. The rest of the town has declared him dead and has started to rifle through his workshop much to Marty’s dismay. Just as he salvages Doc’s old notebook though, the Delorean carrying Einstein the dog comes zapping back into existence (how does the Delorean exist after it was destroyed in the last movie, you may ask? Wibbley wobbley timey wimey). It turns out Doc’s in trouble, and the fail safe on the time machine sent it back to 1986 to retrieve help. So Marty is whisked away to 1931 to find out what happened.
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| You can almost hear the "Great Scott!" just through this image |
The game first and foremost is a great adaptation. To me, this felt like a Back to the Future movie. The love and dedication of the developers is present through the whole series. There are a ton of throwbacks to the movies for all of the fans, but there's a lot of new stuff introduced to keep the story fresh and it gets just as much attention. And while each episode has a self contained story, there's an overarcing plot that ties each episode together incredibly smoothly.
What I loved about the plot most of all was it's appraoch to time travel in general. There are a few points in later episodes when several characters question Marty's constant meddling in their timelines and how that meddling means that their current existence will be erased. It's a moral question you don't normally get out of a simple point and click adventure game, and I might have actually liked to see that played with more.
Another great part of the game? The voice acting. Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as Doc Brown really helps cement the heart and soul of the game and he does a fantastic job. Even more fantastic perhaps is AJ Locasio as Marty McFly, who is frightening in his accuracy. Honestly, you can't really tell the difference. Later in the series Michael J. Fox makes a cameo as well which kind of bookended the series as a whole.
Being a Telltale game, the gameplay consists primarily of point and click, most often meaning that you will combine inventory items endlessly until you get the correct solution. None of the puzzles are particularily hard though, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. On the plus side it means that you won't be throwing any pies at yettis any time soon, on the minus side it's not a COMPLETE challenge. There were a couple of spots I got stuck at, and those were mostly caused by my inability to find hotspots.
Even if you do get stuck, there is a hint system in place to use as you see fit. The hints levels, thankfully, are well done and steer you in the right direction without giving the whole answer away (until you get to the last hint that is). However, there wasn't any real consequence for using the hint system. Previous games I've played with hints oftentimes had either a point system, or at least a way of evaluating you for the final portion of the game if you went to the hints often. This kind of detracted players from using the hints too often. But again, this is Telltale.
The controls are where things sag a bit. This is a trait of Telltale games in general though. Moving around can get a bit clunky at times especially when you want to hurry and finding hotspots can get a bit nitpicky at times.
As in many of the latest point and click adventures, you cannot die in Back to the Future. You can hardly fail at all. But thanks to the great story telling, witty dialogue and overall design the stakes still feel high and there are a couple of pretty epic chase sequences. Hill Valley goes through many transformations so no episode feels static as some of the Strong Bad games were.
As a fan of Back to the Future, I really really enjoyed this game. It isn't perfect in all aspects, but it's a fine send up to the movies. Travelling in the Delorean and making Biff Tannen crash into a pile of manure yourself really makes for a gleeful gaming experience. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some science to experiment with...and by that, I mean make soup.
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