Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series

THOUGHTS

Hoo boy.

I'm a big Telltale fan. While a lot of their recent output has been spotty, Tales from the Borderlands was possibly the best work they've ever done. The Walking Dead season 1 is a bonafide classic. The Wolf Among Us was, at the very least, intriguing and novel. 

Even in their good work, there's a lot of fair and straightforward criticisms one can level at Telltale. Their work is usually pretty shoddy in the technical areas. Their much vaunted choice mechanics are paper thin and often have little to no actual impact. Their stories can meander and lack focus. Game of Thrones has all of those issues and more. 

The most important stuff first — the story is garbage. It's creator sanctioned fan fiction and not particularly good fan fiction at that. You don't get answers, you get cliffhangers. You get archetypes, seemingly trying to emulate someone from the show at every turn, instead of original characters. Instead of the characters from the show being properly integrated, you get awkward cameos. It's just wholly uninteresting and the pacing is extremely awkward. Originally I'd planned to do an episode by episode score breakdown ala Life is Strange, but the first four episodes are so unmemorable it was hard to split them. 

Technically this game is a mess too. The voice acting is solid to good, with some nice turns from Alex Jordan as Asher Forrester and Toks Olagundoye as Beshka, and the actors from the show do a solid job (despite some strangely missing lines that are subtitled). The hand-painted backgrounds that introduce scenes look nice. Beyond that, there's nothing to recommend. This is possibly the worst I've seen the animation in Telltale games, with stiff, robotic movements, overly exaggerated facial expressions and drab, soulless environments. Most of the consequences of the choices are laughable. It ran poorly on a PS4 to boot. There's even typos, especially in the later episodes, which just reeks of a development team under too strict of a time limit. 

To give a bit of credit where it's due, I found the quick time combat weirdly endearing and episode five was a standout. The pacing was better, the characters had a bit more to do and there were even a couple of difficult choices (that had an impact!). Sadly, the final episode released any steam that had gathered, with a limp, unsatisfying ending. 

Plus/Minus

+ Voice acting is mostly good

+ Episode 5 was enjoyably structured

+ Action sequences weren't bad given the format

- Terrible animation, subtitle typos and muddy graphics

- Unsatisfying, uninteresting story 

- Awful use of choice mechanics for the majority of the game

- Pacing issues abound

Overall

I'm not a big fan of Game of Thrones in general, but I wasn't a fan of the Borderlands series and Tales from the Borderlands was one of my favourite games of 2015. This game is a mess, attempting to emulate what makes the show a successful piece of fantasy fiction in broad strokes while missing what people actually enjoy about it. It felt like a checklist and for the majority of the run-time was more of a chore to play than anything. A real step backwards for Telltale. 

3.5/10

Technical Stuff: Played on a PS4. Copy purchased by myself. One full playthrough - approximately 12 hours.