Tell Me Why Episode 3 Review (Video Game, 2020)
Our Tell Me Why adventure finally comes to a conclusion. I’ll say right now that I enjoyed my experience. I did. I think the team at Dontnod succeeded in telling a complex and largely inclusive story with a lot of nuance. I’ll get into the more specific issues that could be deal breakers for certain people later, but I’m overall impressed.
In Episode 3, Alyson and Tyler finally evaluate what they have left in the wake of their new knowledge about their mother and the town’s role in her death. The twins take a break from each other after their fight at the end of Episode 2. Alyson moves back in with her adoptive father Eddy, and Tyler stays at their childhood home. Both are experiencing great anxiety over their inability to control their memory recall power. Alyson is starting to see random memories that seem to be manifestations of her anxiety; Tyler cannot recall what he wants to see anymore. They each need to decide what they want to do moving forward to be happy.
The exploration of grief, anxiety, and mental wellness is spectacular in this episode. There’s even a minigame moment where you have to help Alyson use a breathing app to guide her through a panic attack. Meanwhile, Tyler is going through some kind of depressive episode, unable to feel anything now that progress has stalled on uncovering all the questions he has about his own existence. The people around them do not understand exactly what they’re going through, but they try their best to support them.
The issues come in two varieties: gameplay mechanics and balance of perspective.
There are some wonderful ideas for minigames and puzzles in this adventure game. It’s established early in the first episode that Mary-Ann, Tyler and Alyson’s mother, has some great engineering skills. The house is filled with locks designed as fairy tale puzzles. These puzzles require you to search through the storybook the twins wrote and illustrated with her for answers.
However, on keyboard and mouse, the controls are finnicky. I had many frustrating moments where I could not select the exact option I knew was the right answer because there were too many options onscreen. I would center the option so it popped up, press the action button, and have an entirely different object in the puzzle move. This consistently happened throughout the game, though it was only really detrimental when four or more objects could be selected on one screen.
The third episode, in particular, also suffered a lot from forced fetch quests. Clearly, Dontnod wanted to delay the reveal of information in certain sequences to make Episode 3 roughly the same length as the other two episodes. They largely did this by forcing Alyson or Tyler to repeat the same tasks multiple times in a row, artificially creating difficulty and length by not allowing you to interact with the correct object.
I know how their games work. If you don’t interact with every object in a room before completing the next task, you may never get a chance to. I love their writing, world building, and character interaction, so I make it a point to check everything. I didn’t miss Alyson’s pay stubs she needed for her apartment application; I was not allowed to select them until completing a bunch of other unrelated tasks and forced cutscene interactions.
Again, this was an issue since the first episode, but it really becomes a problem when every level forces those delayed interactions with built in failures. No, I did not miss the right can of degreaser twice to help Sam fix a fishing boat motor; the game refused to let me grab the correct can until I grabbed the wrong one twice. That one is even more egregious because the game forced you to grab the wrong objects in a specific order, checking all the same interactive spots again for the one dot that wasn’t their before. And yes, that also included grabbing the wrong object because there were too many options onscreen and the action would autofocus away from the option you hovered over pretty regularly.
The other issue is perspective. I promised you I would leave the Tessa problem alone until I completed the game; I’m done with the game and it actually got worse.
The Tessa problem is an issue of representation. Tessa, a Tlinkit woman, doesn’t even get an appearance in Episode 3. She’s reduced to a few letters you can find stashed around the home. This is after Dontnod forced cutscenes with the twins being disproportionately aggressive to her character for her role in Mary-Ann’s death. Tessa is one of three adults who played a major role in the twins’ past, and she’s the only one who doesn’t get a chance at redemption in Episode 3.
Tessa is the person who did the most for the family. She provided them with food, clothing, and supplies so they didn’t literally starve or freeze to death in their remote Alaskan home. Even when Mary-Ann could not pay for it, Tessa still helped the family. Her thanks is being shouted down in unavoidable cutscenes by the twins as the climaxes of Episode 1 and Episode 2, blamed for everything wrong in their lives and specifically pinned as the most responsible for Mary-Ann’s mental wellness problems. The woman who tried to help them with everything is presented as greatest monster for wanting to help out.
Meanwhile, Uncle Eddy and Sam get extended sequences in Episode 3. They’re given the chance to create a role in the adult lives of the twins if they player chooses that path. They get to share their stories of Mary-Ann and all the ways they tried to help her in the last days of her life. Remember, Sam tried to shoot Tyler and said incredibly transphobic things in Episode 1, and Uncle Eddy has lied to the twins for over 10 years about everything related to Mary-Ann, her death, and their relationships. They were not the ones dropping to their knees and sobbing at the police station when not allowed to help the twins anymore; Tessa was. Yet they’re the ones who are allowed redemption without the twins weaponizing grief against them in a cemetery.
The easy solution to this particular problem is two-fold. One, Tessa should have had a playable sequence in Episode 3. That is genuinely bad game and narrative design. Two, the order of the interactions should have changed in each episode. Sam or Eddy needed to have the big bad confrontation moment in the climax for narrative balance and it never happened. Eddy does get a dressing down from the twins, but it is the inciting moment in Episode 2, not the climactic challenge at the place you’d usually have the final boss battle. Sam gets nowhere near that kind of intense exchange, as he’s dismissed as a harmless and outdated alcoholic and not held to task for, I don’t know, transphobic comments and attempting to murder Tyler on sight.
The only other BIPOC woman in the game with a larger presence is Officer Denise, one of the tertiary characters you can talk to a few times in the game. She’s Alyson’s friend. She volunteers with the same youth group as Michael, Alyson’s co-worker. Her birthday just happened. That’s all we learn about her. She’s the central figure of two of the forced delay fetch quests, but winds up not having a real role in either. She also only appears in two episodes, Episode 2 and 3, with her role in the first game reduced to a desk with a key in it. The whole opening stretch of Episode 3 is getting ready to celebrate her birthday only to have Denise back out for some reason and the character to disappear from the rest of the game.
There is one other BIPOC woman you meet in the cemetery. Kendra actually has some wonderful character interactions and a memorable role in Episode 2 if you choose to interact with her. You can also ignore her and it has no impact on the actual gameplay. You never see her before or again. Her role is largely foreshadowing for Episode 3, essentially explaining how easy it is for people to escape to this quiet Alaskan town and become lost to the world they once knew.
I don’t think Dontnod intended to dismiss and/or vilify the only female BIPOC characters in the game. I think they made some unfortunate choices in narrative balance that become microaggressions against BIPOC characters, specifically female characters, in the game. Those survey results at the end of the episodes consistently see the majority of gamers on the Windows Store decide against trusting or supporting Tessa at key moments in the story; similar interactions always saw a majority of gamers always trusting Sam, Eddy, and Tom (Tessa’s husband) no matter what.
Again, Sam said transphobic things and pulled a gun on Tyler. Eddy refused to let Tyler and Alyson see each other after the death of Mary-Ann. Tom is the charming mayor and very good to the twins, but he’s hardly worthy of a free pass when he chose again and again to ignore anything happening to Mary-Ann, Alyson, and Tyler toward the end of Mary-Ann’s life. Unconscious bias is still bias.
With all of that said, the LGBTQ representation in Tell Me Why is phenomenal. Dontnod actually teamed up with GLAAD to help make Tyler, the first playable transgender character from a major studio, feel real and true. When I say I trust Dontnod, I know that they put the work in to get this kind of character detail right.
You also have the choice to have Tyler pursue a romantic relationship with Michael. It is not forced on you. I went for it since I thought Michael genuinely had an interest in Tyler. I felt safe exploring Tyler’s sexuality because the game allowed LGBTQ issues to feel accepted, supported, and complicated in equal measure. Tyler’s story is one of coming out to his entire community just by existing, and trying to date Michael let’s him explore his sexuality, as well.
The representation of mental wellness is also very well done. I’m very open on here about my own struggles with depression, PTSD, OCD, and anxiety. I felt safe playing this game, which is largely driven by trying to reconcile childhood and generational trauma. When characters showed signs of clouded or missing memories, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and other symptoms of greater mental wellness concerns, it felt honest.
There are adventure games that weaponize these symptoms against you; Tell Me Why doesn’t. This is obviously something that can vary from person to person, but I felt safe playing this game. That does not mean I wasn’t overwhelmed at the end of Episode 1 and genuinely deflecting from the experience of Alyson’s anxiety and PTSD in Episode 3. I just felt like my own experience with those symptoms and conditions was not being exploited for narrative purposes.
Tell Me Why is a sprawling achievement in adventure game storytelling. I think the PC edition has issues that are likely avoided if you play with a controller on console as intended. The unconscious bias against BIPOC women was not a deal breaker for me, but I could see the treatment of those characters pushing other players out of the experience. I’m grateful for having experienced such a meaningful story and I’m excited to see how Dontnod continues to refine their unique adventure game style in the future.
Tell Me Why is available on Xbox One and PC.
My new book, #31Days: A Collection of Horror Essays, Vol. 1, is available on Ko-fi.
