Witness if you will, a ghost town.

Nah, bugger that, ghost towns are boring and let’s be honest, Scooby Doo and the gang pretty much solved the mystery of every town as well. That old man from the amusement park….b******d.

Witness if you will instead, some writing about a genre which apparently died of death and then came back with a vengeance, and is now among the best titles released.

Telltale Games, a collection of old Lucasarts employees who it appears thankfully escaped being owned by the evil overlords of Disney, have produced some of the best adventure games in recent years, from Sam & Max, to the revival of Monkey Island.

In recent years however, they decided to take the genre further by mixing up the game mechanics with some button mashing, and choices which have an impact on parts of the story being told depending on your choice.

This was first really brought to the forefront with the release of the first series of the Walking Dead, which frankly was utterly amazing, and provided the template for later releases such as The Wolf among us and….well this;

Now when it comes to the next adventure / interactive story setting, you don’t think Borderlands.

Simply because if you played the previous games in the series produced by Gearbox, then in essence you run round from a to b, blow ridiculous amounts of things up with random weapons, one of which screeches every time you fire and listen to various characters who are more unhinged than the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, that guy who stacks shelves in Morrisons (you know the one…), MPs and Barney the dinosaur combined (Seriously, “I love you, you love me….creeps me the f**k out”).

But as Borderlands 3 is not out, and this is another pre-sequel which is not the other pre-sequel to the original sequel, let’s dive into Episode 1 of 5 and see what happens.

The first thing about this if that this time, you will not be playing as one of four different vault hunters with various powers and shooting everything to death in three seconds because it looked at you funny. Nope, you will play as one of two different characters who are just trying to make their way in the world.

You should see the sting they do for the guy who delivers the milk.

Rhys, pictured above in one of numerous “OMG, awesome slow spinny thing to tell you about someone super style” thingys, is a company man just trying to move on up and get a better life for himself. That company just turns out to be Hyperion, who are basically only slightly less underhanded, corrupt, devious and diabolical than Walmart. Rhys also has a funky eye and robot arm which lets him do some hacking things.

The other character who gets introduced later in the episode, is Fiona who happens to be a professional con artist, brought up in the trade and is also out to move on up, just at the expense of everyone else. One of the clever aspects between the two characters during the game is that your user interface changes as well so it’s a nice touch to again differentiate. Fiona for her special ability has money which she can spend on new dialog choices or in one case, a fancy mask. Minted.

I’m scared mummy….

The gameplay is pretty easy it must be said, given it’s following Telltale’s recent formula of button mashing, pressing keys to move out the way of things, selecting dialog and then wandering round a tiny bit before another cut scene kicks in. There is however a slight twist on this in the form of a “loader bot” falling from the sky when you need him most, and then says hi. I’m not kidding on the hi part either.

You then take a very basic control of said bot and it’s a section which is fairly fast paced and doesn’t drag on too long either so all in all, it was a nice little reminder to the fact that in Borderlands, bad things happen and occasionally you’ve got to get on up and beat their asses with gunfire. It’s just handled in a far different manner here, given that Telltale would probably never go for full shooter mechanics within an adventure game.

Look at my sexy body….

It’s fairly obvious that they were thinking about touch screens for the mobile versions with the movement during quicktime events taking the form of a an arrow you’ve probably drag your blood stained finger over. It would have been better to change the UI for that component for different systems so it was a bit clearer but meh.

There is one part of the game where you just have cry havok and let slip the moans of meh, and that is during a section where a death race takes place (No Jason Statham around sadly…what…don’t judge me.) but you cannot hear any of the dialog at all over the rest of the sounds, which frankly is nothing short of terrible audio mastering. They may as well chucked up piano music, had someone tied to the train tracks and had the black screens with writing on like in the good old days.

But that soon passes and thankfully the pay off is more than an excellent set-up for the rest of the series.

One of the few bits you walk around….

So talking about the basic gameplay etc is all well and good and the technical issue of the sound, fair enough. Is the story actually engaging?

In a word, yes.

The way everyone comes together is actually a good story to introduce the insanity of Pandora and the local inhabitants. All of them are unhinged in one form or another and that adds to the fun of a few scenes, which I give some minor spoilerly hightlights; one chap manages to scare the shit out of you twice….asshole. We also get to enjoy the charming personality of Bossanova, a bandit king that enjoys dub step (wub wub, mother flumpers) and of course, death racing.

It’s at the same time that Bossanova comes crashing (litterally) through that we first see Zero, who of course was introduced in Borderlands 2, but the focus wasn’t around him too much which also was welcome for those who may have stayed away from the series in the first place. We get to know everyone else who has an epic sting introduction, and who themselves have a reason for getting up in the morning.

It’s a nice 2 hour opener with plenty of laughs along the way, and remarkably offers life into something which was in danger of being milked to death in the same fashion as most properties these days that made money at some point (Seriously, Jurassic World? Really? Really really?).

The characters are pretty engaging and they all have their own traits which keep you guessing as what you are going to do next, along with some actual moments of laughter. That in itself is a victory for the game. Bring on episode 2, where probably something explodes. And then the explosion explodes.