I have played these before, and I didn't think much of them, but I'm a big enough BTTF fan that I'm curious to try them again. I'll probably go heavy on the walkthroughs, though! I'm really hoping that GOG have the version with the Thomas F Wilson re-recording of Biff...
Nnngh, it's not the TFW version. I was moderately optimistic, as they had the Boen re-recorded version of TOMI. It's frustrating because if you watch a comparison of the two, it's ten times better with TFW's line delivery.
Okay, so this opens really nicely, it all feels very BTTF, they've got all the sounds and music and props and iconic locations, and your first puzzle is humiliating Biff, then the DeLorean shows up. Great stuff. But then it's straight into 'giving Einstein a shoe so he can lead you across town to the person who owned it 50 years ago' and all of a sudden it's feeling very silly and Telltale and not very BTTF at all. Also, it doesn't look awful but it doesn't look great either, it's still got those 2010 Telltale low-ish-res textures and models.
So, while this may not look awful, it does look pretty bad a lot of the time. Really low-res textures right up in your face and camera angles that show all the seams. Plus the UI is ugly as fuck and it's all over the screen the whole time for no good reason - there's Inventory, Hints, Goals (despite me turning those last two off in the settings), and even Story So Far, just cluttering up the top of the screen. The only explanation I can think of is that with such a big IP they wanted to reach non-adventure fans and maybe even people who wouldn't normally play games at all, so they didn't want to hide any buttons away.
The story is a bit more on track now, even though it does just feel like the least imaginative take possible at this stage - Doc is once more stuck in the past with only a short time before he gets killed, but this time it's the thirties! And Biff and George do the diner scene again but this time it's in a soup kitchen! And so on. Also, sections of the original score is just slapped onto any scene seemingly without any real thought about whether they're suitable or not. I get it, they've got the BTTF IP, they want to do the stuff that people remember from those movies, but it's all fairly rote at the moment.
It is awesome to have Christopher Lloyd voicing Doc, though, and he does a really good job here. Plus the Marty soundalike and the teen Doc soundalike are really good.
Finished ep 1. I spent most of it solving stuff without understanding why, and there was a very annoying sequence where you have to listen to Doc's dialogue for clues as to which lab stuff to use and press it in the right order, which it makes you do FOUR times, in a room that is slightly too big to see all of them at the same time and where the particularly crappy character movement (worse than TOMI for some reason) really fucks you over. One of those things where it's inexplicable how it made it through QA. The ending was kinda cool, though, it captured the BTTF action sequence vibe well (especially as I remembered the one irritating thing about it, a tricky to spot item that you can only see from one specific camera angle). But then right at the end it got very silly and had a Tannen in an out of control car careening into a big empty field, right in the middle of which there just happens to be that same D Jones manure truck. It's like a satire of bad fan service. But they cut away a couple of seconds before he hits it, presumably for budget reasons, so it's really unsatisfying anyway. And then Marty and Doc go flying through the sky in their rocket bicycle and utterly coincidentally land two feet from the DeLorean. This game is constantly in flux between being a good BTTF game, a really lazy BTTF game and just a bog-standard early Telltale game.
Lorewise. stupidest thing so far is their excuse for the DeLorean still existing - when it got hit by lightning in BTTF2, that created a clone DeLorean and sent it to 2025. The only error I've spotted is that they give Principal Strickland the first name Gerald, when his office door shows his initials as SS in BTTF 2.
It ended with a really good cliffhanger, but then cut straight to a "in the next episode' spoiler reel, UGH. The cliffhanger did genuinely make me want to play the next one, though, even though iirc it spends the whole thing in the 30s again before doing more interesting stuff with the remaining episodes.
Yeah, so episode 2 is a bit of a step down. The very start is pretty cool, where you're having to dodge the you from episode 1, and you have to save your grandfather's life before you fade out of existence. Otherwise... the 30s again, nothing particularly interesting going on, solving stuff without knowing why, silly Telltale non-BTTF puzzles and story (some guy whose mood and life decisions can be manipulated by changing the song he's listening to, 1920s Doc essentially inventing a flying car), some really clunky storytelling (seems to be a combination of bugs and just not having time to put the proper amount of polish in), and that bloody manure truck AGAIN basically spawning in magically just in time for Tannen to fall off a roof into it. And much like with TOMI they reuse character models a bunch - with BTTF, of course, that's not so much of a problem as many members of a family are played by the same 'actor' as per the movies, but it's a shame that they also do it with various other characters where that doesn't apply. They fluffed the cliffhanger too, so it's less enticing than the previous one, despite ep 3's set-up being a lot cooler.
Okay, ep 3 isn't great either. It's got a really strong premise (Edna Strickland has married Doc and together they've created an Orwellian police state where everyone has to follow old busybody rules) but they barely do anything fun with it. The first thing you're supposed to do is break lots of rules so you can meet this alternate Doc, which should be really satisfying but instead just boils down to lots of tedious puzzles. The stuff with Doc being frosty and even scary, and with Biff being brainwashed into either being super-nice or a zombified thug, is good fun, but that's about it. The episode is really short and ends really abruptly, though. I guess they thought of 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 as a couple of two-part chapters, rather than four individual ones. It's a shame that they didn't do a strong new set-up each episode.
Ugh, okay, ep 4 does one little bit in the Orwellian '86 and then it's back to the 30s again. At least we're at the high school instead of the town square this time, but still. Also, I'm starting to remember now that they do some weird drama stuff with Edna and questioning whether Marty has the right to change the timeline back and stuff - it's the same overloading of an IP that they did with TOMI. That hasn't happened yet, though.
Oh, okay, it doesn't actually take place in the school, just out on the lawn, and the rest is in Emmett's lab. I remember now why Telltale had a reputation, at least until The Walking Dead, of their episodic schedule and budgets often scuppering their games - they do tend to feel rushed and cheap quite often. The puzzle design on this one was infuriating too - I consistently knew what I was trying to do and what all the components were, but I couldn't figure out how to get there because the structure was so fiddly and the signposting so muddy. And yeah, it does this weird thing where you're trying to break up teen Emmett and teen Edna, and suddenly Orwellian Emmett flips from 'yeah, she's super evil, let's wipe this version of me from existence!' to guilting you out about it. I'm not sure if the game is just setting up antagonists for the finale or if I'm genuinely supposed to be questioning my madcap actions on an ethical level. It's all very unsatisfying either way. Just a bunch of strange decisions being made with the basic set-up of 'the further adventures of Marty and Doc'.
I'm going to play the last episode, mostly because Michael J Fox cameos in it, but I'm going to hint-system my way through it as soon as I hit a stumbling block.
Whoof, finished, and that got pretty embarrassing by the end. It starts off promisingly with the 'science of the future' expo setting, but you don't actually get to mess about with any retro-futuristic stuff, outside of 'a phone' and 'a flowerpot with a recording device in it'. Then it moves onto a sliding doors puzzle, a dialogue puzzle that I just clicked through without thinking, an Escape From Monkey Island/Gabriel Knight 3-level sequence in a field where you have to get someone to remember a bad thing they did by putting a mop on a cactus to remind her of someone she saw and a sign on a toilet to remind her of a building etc, and the finale which is just the same as episode 1's with a reskin and some irritating 'get the cursor to stay in the same place for a few seconds' minigame x 3. By this point, none of their time-travel logic makes any sense at all, never mind by BTTF rules, so they just give up and go 'oh no, it's all messed up, you fly off to fix it, to be continued!'
The stuff with feeling bad for Edna and alt Doc kind of just went away again, not sure what was going on there.
Genuinely frustrating that they had the IP, the co-creator, the actors, all this stuff, and this series is what they did with it.
Rating: the occasional high point, but mostly rubbish
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