Ahhh, nostalgia!
Back to the Future: The Game Episode 1: It's About Time
4.0/5.0 "Double Rainbows"
The first episode in Telltale's latest point and click adventure game was released late December 2010 for PC and Mac via Telltale's site and Steam. Releases for PS3 and iPad are slated for 'early 2011'.
First things first, this game is not for everyone. True the the genre, you point and you click and you have an adventure. There's no combat system, no bullet time, no desserts that wish to deceive you and no zombie hoards. The style of game play is much more stripped down, hearkening back to the glory days of The Secrets of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. As someone who grew up with a wicked crush on George (yes, George) McFly and an insatiable appetite for Hugo's House of Horrors and Transylvania I this game hit all the little nostalgic pleasure centers of my brain with a finely honed stick of chocolate coated gooey happiness.
The game starts off with an interactive recreation of the first test run of the DeLorean, a scene which I only mention here because I found delightful in it's nostalgia inducing-ness. The actual story of the game picks up about six months after Back to the Future III leaves off, by Marty's reckoning at least. An admittedly generic 'Doc is missing, and you have to save him!' plot point is inserted and Marty ends up back in a Prohibition-era Hill Valley populated by a 20 something Doc Brown, a timid member of the McFly family and, surprise surprise, another bad Tannen egg. I can't quite tell you much more than that without giving away the plot but items are gathered, puzzles are solved and mischief is made leaving the path for episodes 2 and beyond wide open.
Graphically this game isn't stunning; which is not to say that it's ugly or unrefined in any way, merely that it's not 15th century Florence recreated block by block. The voice acting is superb and while Christopher Lloyd's return to Doc Brown is not anything to be ashamed of, A.J. LoCascio steals the show as a dead ringer for Michael J. Fox's Marty. The writing is everything you would expect from Telltale with oodles of in jokes and little nods to not only the source material but the 80's in general. Game play, as I've already mentioned is classic point-and-click-adventure game play, which may not be the most challenging thing in the world but it opens up the game to any level of player, even the novice. As far as 'bang for your buck' goes, you pay for all the episodes upfront which may be a bit hard to swallow but I expect good things from the remainder of the series.
