The first episodic adventure game of Dontnod Entertainment, Tell Me Why, is about a brother and sister revisiting their old family home to recall fuzzy childhood memories. Both these games revolve around the theme of re-visiting the past, which means the developers of Tell Me Why can learn from the triumphs and mistakes of Life is Strange to create a game with improved pacing, less linear gameplay, and a more consistent tone.
The time travel adventure game Life is Strange drew heavy inspiration from time travel media such as The Butterfly Effect in its exploration of the unforeseen consequences that come with changing the past. Maxine Caulfield, a photography student from the town of Arcadia Bay, discovers she has the ability to rewind time, a power she uses to save her childhood friend Chloe from a murder attempt. The act of saving Chloe's life, though, alters the timelines in unforeseen ways, and each new change Maxine makes leads to another unforeseen consequence.
According to trailers and press releases, the plot of Tell Me Why revolves around two playable protagonists, Alyson and Tyler (a trans man). As adults, the two siblings return to their childhood home in Alaska, searching for clues to reconstruct what happened on the fateful night that left them orphaned. Unlike Life is Strange, the adventure game Tell Me Why doesn't have overt time travel, but it still retains subtly supernatural gameplay based on revisiting the past through images and impressions left by objects. For this reason, the developers of Tell Me Why have the chance to improve on the episodic game formula they established with Life is Strange in two big ways:
Tell Me Why Can Have a More Consistent Tone
The main narrative of Life is Strange had a tendency to vary in tone at times, with moments of light-hearted comedy being followed by dark tragedy. There were also moments in the plot, particularly in the relationship between Maxine and Chloe, where characters made out-of-character choices – decisions which served the plot at the expense of their actual personalities.
With Tell Me Why, Dontnod Entertainment seems to have woven a more grounded storyline, featuring ing characters that are more relatable and consistent in their behavior, with less melodrama for the sheer sake of it. One example of the new approach Dontnod has taken for Tell Me Why is in their depiction of Tyler, a trans man who was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl during his early childhood. According to gamesindustry.biz, as one of the first transgender protagonists in video game history, Dontnod has been working with LGBTQ advocacy groups to create a story in which Tyler's trans male identity is not the root of his past trauma and he doesn't encounter gratuitous prejudice within his story.
Tell Me Why Can Be Less Linear & Have More Endings
For a game about time travel, the plot of Life is Strange Season 1 was rather linear, with the wide range of timeline-altering choices Maxine could make collapsing back into a single ending with a final binary moral choice. Life is Strange Season 2, on the other hand, had four endings which players unlocked through the culmination of decisions that sibling protagonists Sean and Daniel made: more importantly, most of the endings are ambiguous in tone, letting players decide for themselves if they're "Good" or "Bad" in nature.
With luck, Tell Me Why will retain the larger selection of ambiguous, bittersweet story endings Life is Strange Season 2 introduced, while offering a more non-linear open world experience that lets players explore the game's setting more freely and engage with certain story events in different order. Ideally, gamers who player Tell Me Why will unlock certain gameplay decisions not by making "good" or "bad" choices, but by choosing to focus on more complex themes like forgiveness vs. anger, persistence versus letting go, and looking to the past versus focusing on the future.
Source: gamesindustry.biz
