Tell Me Why is currently free on Steam until July 1st, so I figured now would be as good of a time as any to review it. Made by the creators of Life Is Strange, Tell Me Why follows a similar gameplay and episodic structure to tackle a new variety of the problems that young people face in the world today. While Life Is Strange was all about interpersonal relationships Tell Me Why is more about family and perception, which is a very interesting topic that it doesn’t necessarily land. Good thing it was free. There will be vague spoilers about player choices (or the lack thereof) in this review.
TMW follows the story of a pair of twins, Tyler and Alyson, as they struggle with their tormented past. They lived in the middle of the woods on the edge of a small town in Alaska with their naturalist, possibly unbalanced, and too-creative-for-her-own-good mother for over a decade until one night where she went crazy and tried to kill Tyler, only for Tyler to kill her in self defense. From this lighting rod of a scene setting we jump to ten years later, with Tyler leaving an institution for troubled children and his sister coming to pick him up to reconnect and get help in selling their old house. What follows is a story full of themes of perception, memory, and how past trauma shapes your present and future, but with the twist that our main characters have special TWIN POWERS that let them read each other’s minds and relive each other’s memories.
This leads into what is probably the biggest disappointment or even outright lie in TMW, where we’re introduced to this supernatural power but it never really goes anywhere. Unlike Life Is Strange there is no explanation for this special bond, and the numerous hints or even outright examples of supernatural phenomenon that Tyler and Alyson experience are never explained. As the game’s three episodes progress the first two show straight up unnatural things like the children’s memories coming to life, creatures lurking where the twins wouldn’t be aware of them, or their powers raging out of control for no reason, but the game doesn’t actually provide any closure for the broader implications of these events. In many ways this makes TMW stand out among the episodic games that I’ve played in that in feels like it was made with one idea in mind but then ends with a completely different one. You see it after the first episode, which is mostly flashback memories and one puzzle with some supernatural elements, followed by the second episode with more interactivity, mini-games, and hints of supernatural elements, followed by the final episode with even more one-and-done mini-games and the supernatural elements are layered on in a way that both ignores what came before and doesn’t resolve what comes after.
The inclusion of mini-games isn’t a surprise, as the most common complaint about TMW is that almost nothing happens during the game. Say what you want about Life Is Strange, but Max’s time warping powers led to not only interesting action moments but also had an application in the game’s dialogue sequences, which made your powers feel like they not only had an impact in the world but also gave them a role in how you shaped your relationship with those around you. TMW‘s powers don’t engage with the world in the same way as they are almost entirely scripted, narrative, or exploration based, where you won’t be using your powers to increase your social standing or save someone like you would in Life Is Strange and instead you use it to remember trips to the grocery story or one of three whole times that Tyler and Alyson use it to strategize telepathically during key conversations. This makes the world feel far more static, and more something that these characters are observing rather than living in, which may be an intentional way to highlight the social isolation they feel in their drive to escape from their boonies lifestyle but usually just feels hollow as the game progresses.
I personally blame this hollow feeling on three factors: the lack of characters, the binary story, and the framing of said story. TMW has essentially five characters, not counting the twins and their mom, which is a far cry from other games in the narrative-driven point-and-click genre. I’m talking about your Telltale games like the Walking Dead series or even Life Is Strange itself, where five to six characters are just your main cast and doesn’t even take into account the other characters you meet along the way. Outside of one or two cops and an unnecessary sideline character the only people you’ll really be interacting with are five key members of Tyler and Alyson’s lives, which makes your relationships and interactions with them feel somewhat empty or vacant when they’re seemingly all that exists in this world that the game has created.
This void in the world is further sculpted by the game severely lacking any sense that your choices impact the world around you. I don’t think anyone actually buys “your choices matter” any more, but games like Telltale’s Walking Dead at least offered enough ways to feel like you were building relationships in the story. Sure the asshole guy was still an asshole and the friendly guy was still at least tentatively friendly, but the notes those characters hit outside of scripted sequences differed enough from a portion of the other players that you remember it as your own experience. TMW‘s limited characters and segmented areas where you engage with them (you will NEVER interact with two of these characters at the same time) makes conversations feel less like you’re actually balancing relationships and more like you’re just hitting sign posts on your way down a street.
In reality there’s only one relationship in the game that actually matters, but that leads to the game’s third problem and ultimately the biggest nail in the coffin for me: the binary nature of the twin’s relationship. Modern point-and-click games live and die on the story they weave and, in my opinion at least, the feeling that the choices you’re making impact the world around you in some small way. Who do you save when the zombies attack? How do you deal with the dangerous man that wants a favor in exchange for helping you out of a jam? These option A or option B choices are binary but they aren’t black and white, they aren’t dark side or light side, they aren’t saint or jerk, they’re CHOICES. There may be a right one or a wrong one from your point of view, but they’re just that: they’re opinion or knee-jerk based right and wrong. TMW‘s choices are essentially all based on one thing: do you want to make your twin happy or sad? Sure there are minor (imagine the word minor written in thirty-foot high letters) moments where your dialogue choices will affect the feelings of the other five characters, but that will almost never impact the story in a perceivable way and 99% of the time you’re only dealing with how Alyson or Tyler feel about their twin, based on which character you’re controlling at the time.
This means we get to Persona 3-tier levels of social interaction where the only “right choice” in any conversation is going along with whatever the NPC sibling says is true or what will support their feelings the most. Is your sister being a pain about the current situation? Is your brother a little too insistent that your mother was a jerk? Doesn’t matter, you’d better smash that “whatever you say” button to get the sweet, sweet indicator that shows they appreciated your decision, or else you’ll draw ever closer to the “bad ending” where the twins are no longer in sync, despite the fact that like most of these games the twins still fall out of sync because of the plot regardless of your choices and UNLIKE other story-driven games this problem is never resolved outside of a shrug and “well it makes us special so let’s keep being psychic”.
This binary “good choice bad choice” structure means that much of the game is either a conversation that affects the siblings’ relationship or exposition, and to be honest neither option is very interesting. This is further hampered by the game revolving around Tyler and Alyson’s flashback powers, which is literally an exposition machine that fuels more exposition as we see a moment from their past followed by two to six lines about “Remember that time we went for ice cream and mom yelled at a squirrel?” or other adventures in the lives of two poor children and their mother that made her own cleaning supplies. These are the things two siblings that haven’t seen each other in ten years would go through while exploring the home and town they grew up in together, but these aren’t the sort of things that make for a very interesting game to play. In fact it creates the opposite, as there’s only so many different ways you can write “our mom was weird and poor” or “I want to move out of this town” before it all starts to bleed together.
What doesn’t bleed together are the game’s visuals, which aren’t ground breaking but you can create unscripted tracks in the snow and look at some nice landscapes. Sometimes too nice, actually, to the point where many conversations are started or hang on two characters staring at a forest or frozen lake for just long enough that you’re unsure whether there’s supposed to be dialogue here or if you’re supposed to get up and move to the next thing to click on. The characters are also aided by decent voice acting that, while good, is hampered by dialogue that continues the trend set by Life Is Strange by being relatively clunky at times, especially when it’s weighed down by the aforementioned exposition. Also while music isn’t my biggest point of expertise I thought the music was much weaker in TMW than Life Is Strange, acting more as backdrop for overlong introductory shots than anything that set the mood or tone of relevant narrative moments outside of the lead-in to the third episode.
Overall Tell Me Why is a slowly paced game with potential for big ideas and tackling big questions that fails to deliver on either. Was the twins’ mom crazy? Are there more supernatural things than just the twins? What is affecting their powers? What is the extent of their abilities? Why does the developer insist the bad ending is still as good as the good ending? All of this is never explained or at best barely developed in a story that had a perfect setting for exploring perception, identity, and how one chooses to deal with the past but instead plods around carrying a storybook full of childhood memories and a super power that really doesn’t make for a very interesting story or game if it’s all you have to lean on. If exploring these themes with even the faintest of brushes interests you then feel free to give it a go since for the next few weeks it won’t cost you a dime, or even grab it if you aren’t interested but just want to add to your massive pile of backlogged games that you’ll never get around to finishing. But I wouldn’t recommend spending money on this game unless you have eight hours to kill and this genre is the only kind of video game you enjoy.
