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Between four episodes of The Wolf Among Us earlier in the year and Game of Thrones on the horizon, 2014 has been an excellent year for fans of Telltale Games — and that’s without mentioning the hotly anticipated Tales from the Borderlands. The first episode of the new series released this week, alongside a launch trailer that offers a peek into its new vision of Pandora.
Set after the end of Borderlands 2, Tales from the Borderlands centres around co-protagonists Fiona and Rhys, an unlikely couple who are thrown together in the search for riches. Like most Telltale titles, the game will be released episodically, with a further four installments set to follow yesterday’s season opener.
However, for all the structural similarities that Tales from the Borderlands shares with other Telltale output, the trailer demonstrates quite aptly just how much this game is set to stray from the studio’s recent norm in terms of tone. In-keeping with the Borderlands franchise, this is a much more light-hearted experience than the likes of The Walking Dead.
It’s worth noting that, while high drama has brought great success to Telltale over the past few years, that hasn’t always been the focus. Back in the early days of the studio, it was its adaptations of more comedic properties like Sam & Max, Wallace and Gromit and Homestar Runner that brought the studio to the attention of many.
Based on what we’ve seen so far of the game, it certainly seems that Telltale hasn’t lost its knack for comedy. Action sequences are one way to integrate the Borderlands experience into this type of game, but adopting the same irreverent sense of humor as its source material is what’s really important — and all signs point to Tales from the Borderlands doing just that.
It will certainly be interesting to see Telltale’s trip to Pandora play out alongside their excursion to Westeros, with the studio’s Game of Thrones project still set to begin its six-episode run before the year is out. The two very different series will provide an interesting counterpoint to one another as they play out over the next several months — but we’ll have to see whether running two new series at once will affect the studio’s notoriously uneven release scheduling.
For now though, the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands should be just enough to satiate fans for a little while. Are you excited to see Pandora through a different lens? Or are you holding out for Game of Thrones? Let us know in the comments section below.
Tales from the Borderlands: Zer0 Sum is available to download now for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with an Xbox 360 release to follow on December 3.
