Thoughts on - Back to the Future: The Game - It’s About Time

As someone who’s played far too many Telltale games: a handful of Sam and Max episodes, all of Wallace and Gromit, every Tales of Monkey Island game, and most of Strong Bad, it’s not a stretch to say the developer’s one-size-fits-all template is starting to feel overused and overplayed.

Every single game has the same story structure, the same plasticy visual design, the same “Three Trials” puzzle tree and the same lumbering pace. And that template feels far too stretched to accommodate franchises as visually, structurally and thematically diverse as the quaint Wallace and Gromit, the hilarious Monkey Island and the bombastic Back to the Future.

Pottering around, solving meaningless chores and jabbering to townsfolk seems perfectly appropriate in the toffee tin world of West Wallaby Street, but it just feels slow and restrictive in the breakneck-speed adventure of Hollywoods’ eighties franchise. Back to the Future lacks that ineffable verve that is impossible to find within the tight constraints of Telltale’s cookie cutter game design.

Besides, we already have the perfect time travel game: Day of the Tentacle. LucasArt’s incredible point and click had you hopping back and forth through the past, present and future to solve puzzles, and see how a change in the past would affect the future. For example, christening the United States flag in the shape of a tentacle gives you the perfect disguise, ready to be plucked from a flag pole in the 22nd century.

So to see Back to the Future’s fertile source material be used so plainly and so effortlessly, is a damn shame. Especially when its often used so flippantly as an easy out to describe why certain, obvious solutions are out of reach (it will destroy the space time continuum!).

The first episode funny and it’s got some nice references to the movies, but it definitely feels like Telltale needs to hang up this overused template, and attack its next franchise with a custom-made game design.