The game's full of this knowing humor, and whether it's the smarter writing or Telltale's continuing de-emphasizing of player agency in their adventure games, it totally works as this silly caper adventure movie that you have some small measure of interaction with. For instance, a selection of cool quips to choose from followed by a scene of your character getting knocked out before they can get out a single word of their killer one-liner. What's rad is that self-deprecation encompasses Borderlands and Telltale alike: there's been a lot of "they will remember that" goofs and some choices for dialogue and actions are intended to be entirely pointless, as becomes evident the second after you make them. The Vault Key's a red herring, the characters all wish they were more competent than they really are (fortunately for them, this also extends to their foes), and neither of your two protagonists are all that trustworthy or sympathetic - giving the player the opportunity of gently pushing them either towards misunderstood heroes or greedy scoundrels with the Telltale-patented binary decision matrix.
What helps make Tales From the Borderlands work is a well-written sense of self-deprecation and comic timing that the original games weren't quite clever enough to pull off with the same regularity. The player takes double protagonist duty as the luckless Rhys, who has been sacrificing much of his humanity for a shot at a top-level position within the antagonistic corporation Hyperion from Borderlands 2, and the stylish confidence woman Fiona, who works with her sister Sasha and adoptive guardian Felix to pull a multi-million con on those same Hyperion bigwigs.
The Borderlands games all invariably involve a "vault key" McGuffin and a hunt for the lock it pertains to, and early on Tales From the Borderlands is no exception. It's insinuated that the first brought the latter two, and that those with money were drawn to the planet due to many legends of untold wealth and advanced technology hidden within its alien vaults. All right, so there were plenty of assholes on Arrakis too so let let me rephrase that: it's a version of Arrakis that attracts a few specific brands of asshole, specifically cold corporations, merciless mercenaries and psychopathic scavengers. The Borderlands games are loot shooter-RPGs set on the remote desert/wasteland planet of Pandora, which is sort of like Arrakis but for assholes.
I'll figure out how to split the final three episodes between Indie Game of the Week entries to come. This week's entry will cover the first two episodes: Zer0 Sum and Atlas Mugged. Since the start of 2017, I've been pondering a way to cover it within this Indie Game of the Week feature of concise reviews while still giving each chapter an ample amount of discussion and elucidation, similar to how I covered Life is Strange at the end of 2015.
While I've never been particularly impressed by the storytelling of either Telltale or Borderlands, I'd heard enough good things about this joint venture that I picked up the PS4 version some time last year. I've been wracking my brain for a while about how best to write up my take on Tales from the Borderlands, Telltale's episodic adventure game based on Gearbox's Borderlands universe. Indie Game of the Week 15: Tales from the Borderlands