Implayed (Episode 28): Back To The Future: Ep 1 – It’s About Time

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with adveture games my whole life, but at least they’ve been getting quite a bit easier over the years. Telltale Games has a good track record when it comes to this kind of games though, and the Back To The Future series is a nice candidate of that. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Well, the first thing you may notice when you get into the game is the fact that it certainly doesn’t look the way you expect it to. It’s cartoony, sure, but despite this, it’s still immediately evocative of the movies, perhaps because the elements that make the movie so iconic are… well… so iconic. Marty sounds like Marty, the Doc Brown sounds like Doc Brown, and we even get to meet the young Emmet Brown. It’s a sequel to the movies, mind you. Dunno if it’s canon, but it links up to the movies well enough to be.

Great Scott!

Gameplay is standard adventure game fare, you have an inventory with items you can use to interact with other stuff you find around the world, there’s puzzles to be solved and so on, all of them fitting in with the time traveling theme of Back To The Future. It immerses you in the universe, with its specific humour and references to history (“let’s get out of here before we get Hoover elected for a second term”).

The story also plays along with the fact that playing with history can provoke some odd consequences. Since everything in Back To The Future is linked to the relatives of Marty or the other characters (Tannen), the consequences tend to revolve around the main characters. It’s focused and effective. Unfortunately, I have hit a gamebreaking bug halfway through the game, and I couldn’t get past it until I reloaded the chapter.

I guess we always forget that wisdom.

The episode isn’t long, but it’s great if you love Back To The Future. Even if you don’t remember every “Great Scott” that Doc Brown says in the movies, it’s still a fun beginning to a quite long series, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s episode.

The entire series is out on Steam at 25 Euros (that includes all 5 episodes). It’s charming and as Back to the Future as it can be.

Here’s the Implayed of episode 2.