I'll just briefly touch on the story, since the first half is a lot of table-setting with its in-media-res "explain to the mysterious kidnapper what happened" followed by the proverbial record scratch and "yep, that's me" before we go back to what I assume is a few days prior (if there was a chyron, I missed it). Rhys is a charismatic (or at least he'd like to think so) young (ditto) executive within Hyperion who, with help from his buddies Vaughn (a craven accountant) and Yvette (a pragmatic requisitions officer), has been angling for a top job within the organization in the midst of a corporate reshuffle following the death of the CEO Handsome Jack at the end of Borderlands 2. Instead, he discovers his chief rival Vasquez has beaten him to it, summarily executing the middle-management in his way. Given that he's Patrick Warburton playing Ellis from Die Hard, I'm already liking this entirely unlikeable villain, and it's not long before Rhys seizes on an opportunity to give Vasquez a hard time after the latter demotes him to janitor. That hard time involves beating him to the punch with the purchase of a Vault Key and finding where it belongs to make a huge amount of bank. He and Vaughn just have to travel down to Pandora with a briefcase full of embezzled corporate assets and make the deal.

Meanwhile Fiona is gearing up to trade a fake Vault Key to Hyperion via the scary mobster intermediary August, who has already been buttered up by Fiona's sister (and gun enthusiast) Sasha. Her con runs parallel with the deal Rhys is preparing to make, and due to circumstances beyond anyone's control a cadre of bandits bust in and steal the briefcase containing the cash with Zer0 in hot pursuit after the gig is up. The rest of the chapter involves a series of improvised plans to infiltrate the bandits' hideout, take back the briefcase and split the lucre now there's no longer a key to worry about. Instead, Felix betrays his wards, the briefcase explodes showering the bandits with money, and the remaining group is left standing in the carnage wondering where to go next. A sudden serendipitous drop into an old Atlas prototype lab gives them a new lead to what might actually be a real Vault to plunder. However, due to downloading some data from an infected memory stick to his brain in order to track the briefcase earlier (long story), Rhys is suddenly surprised by a digitized hologram of Handsome Jack that only he can see.

As with any first episode, there's a mix of action and humor to ease you into the type of adventure you're playing, but the most vital thing are the early introductions. Characters are particularly fluid in Telltale games, as your interactions with them can affect their disposition towards you later on or in some extreme cases determine whether or not they're still around. For example, a Hyperion Loader Bot that you summon for an early fight against some bandits will get itself damaged, and can be told to self-destruct to take out more of the enemies surrounding you or told to escape to prevent its utter annihilation. He shows back up at the end of the episode, and while I've not noticed it make much of a difference yet, I'm sure some part of episode 2 will be influenced by the consequences of that choice. Speaking of which:

With Fiona's side, I notice quite a few big disagreements. I kept my cool because I want Fiona to shape up to be the semi-competent foil to Rhys's bumbling clod, even if that's a fairly cliché dynamic. It's more that Rhys was destined to be a screw-up and I wanted at least one of my protagonists to know what they were doing. Two accident-prone buffoons as the leads might get dull before too long. I warned Felix because I hate to get anyone taken out of the story this early, even if he did screw us over and may have survived either way. Sure, he betrays us, but that's no reason to think he won't show up later for some kind of redemptive sacrifice. Besides, Felix and the sisters are family: it'll take more than one betrayal for Fiona to want him dead. The Psycho Mask thing ties into a curious aspect unique to Fiona's chapters: there's situations where you can steal money, and then spend that money for an alternative outcome. Given the only money I saw to collect involved robbing a dying man, I let it be and stayed with the default ten bucks for the first chapter, which wasn't enough to buy a cooler mask. (For the record, Rhys's unique aspect is his cybernetic eye, which lets him remote hack computers and download all sorts of data about background objects.)

With Rhys's side, you can see that most players are generally eager to make more friends than enemies. We stayed with Vaughn rather than letting him be Vasquez's scapegoat for our own safe return (and trusting Vasquez just seems like a really bad idea, especially considering how badly you've screwed him over), we tried to bond with Sasha so she wouldn't keep waving her rifle at us, and we told Loader Bot to get out of there because who doesn't want a sassy robot companion? Especially one with a minigun? I have no idea if the gun loadout is significant or not. I was just pressing buttons during that sequence without considering the importance. There were a number of different combos, though, so I have to imagine the 25.8% here might still be the majority option.

Anyway, with what feels like the maximum amount of living characters for the second episode to explore, I'm feeling OK about the choices I was given. The framing device, which sees a tied up Rhys and Fiona, neither of whom are happy to see the other, explaining their sides of the story raises a whole lot of questions, not least of which is the identity of their masked abductor and the status of Vaughn, Sasha, and the rest. I'd guess it'll take a few more episodes before we're caught up.

The second episode begins with the group inside the Atlas lab, which involved some conversations with Handsome Jack, who I was not happy to see return but am willing to give some leeway towards given the better writing in this game, and Fiona popping out a guy's eyeball. One grisly deocularizing (not a word) later, we learn our next destination: Old Haven, the location of the Atlas Gortys Project.

However, things don't go smoothly once they hit the road, with the Hyperion's orbiting HQ firing down orbital "moonshots" and the awakening of a Rakk Nest. Rhys and Vaughn bump into Vasquez after they get separated, who has come down to Pandora to deal with them personally, and eventually escape with the help of Loader Bot. The player can choose to follow Fiona and Sasha to Hollow Point or skip ahead by going directly to Old Haven, where all sorts of treasures await. Unfortunately, they have the misfortune of meeting another familiar face: August, the mercenary the sisters hustled back in the first episode. He's working for Vasquez, or at least with Vasquez, and are planning on using the Gortys (I keep wanting to type "Gorkys", but that's a whole different game involving a secret base in an abandoned town) to pay back a scary-sounding crime lord named Vallory.

Meanwhile, Fiona and Sasha meet up with Scooter to get their busted caravan fixed, but get tangled up with some mercenaries. One, Athena, is clearly bad news, and the duo barely escape back to Scooter's garage when it's revealed that Scooter's business partner is also Athena's girlfriend, and she drops the scary competent mercenary act for her sake. That gives the sisters an opportunity (and an awkward social moment) to quietly slip out with the new caravan and make their way to Old Haven, where they meet up with Rhys and Vaughn mid-hostage situation. Fiona and Rhys are forced to use the Atlas key they found - since they were the ones to first touch it, they're the only ones that can hold them in a convenient plot twist - to summon whatever this Gortys project was. However, that also attracts the attention of a lot of security robots and Rhys is given a desperate choice: let Handsome Jack into his cranium so he can remotely turn off the drones surrounding them, or go with Fiona's crazy grenade plan. The episode ends immediately either way. Let's get to those decisions:

On Fiona's side, the choice to send Sasha to help Rhys was mostly motivated by the fact that the back of the caravan - where Fiona was - was considerably more dangerous than the cockpit where Rhys was. What's the term for heroes being invincible until they're not? Plot armor? I knew the protagonists would be fine, but I'm always looking for ways to keep secondary characters like Sasha and Vaughn safe just in case. The Jakobs brand car was another one of those superficial decisions based on how much money Fiona had on her. I blew what I had on the slightly fancier palette swap even if I knew it wasn't going to affect much. I think that's probably going to be true of all of Fiona's buying decisions, though it would be amusing if there was some super late episode 5 purchase that requires every bit of money in the game and makes a significant difference to the story. Given I didn't steal from the dying guy from episode 1, I wasn't going to find out what that was regardless. I'm also not going to go around opening other people's presents, especially after a heartfelt "we still have each other, sis" cutscene. Last, the elemental damage was simply one of three choices: I went with electricity because I figured it would stun the mercenary Finch, not kill him (I have a thing about killing people this playthrough, clearly). Since it was a one in three choice, 32% sounds about right.

On Rhys's side, letting Vaughn know about the Handsome Jack specter made sense if only because Rhys could explain why he kept getting startled and talked to people who weren't there. It's possible Vaughn could've figured out it was due to that weird scientist's ID chip Rhys downloaded earlier (and he actually did bring it up, so I'm glad someone in this game is paying attention). I went straight to Old Haven because those characters didn't know Hollow Point, a dive full of thieves and con artists, and could've been caught up in any number of misadventures while trying to find the sisters. Made more sense to go ahead and wait for them. As for the bro fist, well, you can't leave a bro hanging, can you? (That it turned out to be Fiona narrating the bros bro-ing out with a brotastic fistpump part was a pretty funny goof.) And of course I'm going to go with Fiona's plan, as insane as it was, because we're sisbros. No way to tell if that's going to get anyone killed, but I'm not going to let Handsome Jack into Rhys head any more than I already have to. (Oh, and damn right I called Vasquez a wallethead. It was a weak goof (Handsome Jack's idea, naturally), but I'll take any chance to make him feel worse about himself.)