Back to the Future, Episode 1

The three Back to the Future films are forever imbued with a sense of joyful nostalgia for me. Those intermingling timelines have run alongside my own in various permutations since I was a whippersnapper first caught up in the concept of time travel. A few months ago, I was nestled into a cinema watching the re-released Back to the Future on the big screen — the various paradoxes and accidental influences to fragile chronologies set playfully inside the colourful freneticism of Marty McFly’s world hold up very well, and create a pretty great game-location. My heart was filled with substantial glee upon first hearing that Telltale Games were getting their nerdy hands on the license, but I wondered whether the game’s flux capacitor would run on plutonium or pure, heady nostalgia.

First of all, the world has been recreated convincingly. Christopher Lloyd was brought in to voice Doc Brown again and while he sounds like he may have smoked several billion cigarettes in the interim (or just, you know, aged twenty years), his spirit feels alive and well. Meanwhile, they were conveniently able to track down Marty’s absolute aural doppelganger and his dialogue is zingy and accurate. In addition to vocal authenticity, the game is shot through with a special kind of sincerity; various touches lace the narrative and environment with a series of reverent nods to those who crafted the world initially and the time within which the story is placed, while the art style successfully conveys the aesthetically joyful exuberance of the films.

At the game’s outset, you’re placed inside a dose of from-the-script nostalgia which feels perhaps a little over-indulgent but is enjoyable all the same. After being winched away from that pocket of film memory, the narrative takes you along a timeline separate from those held within the films. The story, set six months after the end of Back to the Future III, involves the prohibition era, various moronic gangsters and a soup kitchen. While the story itself doesn’t feel particularly inspired or remarkable, it’s nonetheless enjoyable to run through due in large part to the way in which the characters have been recaptured for the game. A twist made on one specific character reveals the ability of the writers to genuinely enrich aspects of the Back to the Future canon.

As with each of the recent Telltale episodic adventure games, moving around in the various locations is a bit unwieldy — numerous times, Marty veers wildly off and it’s necessary to wrangle him back under your will with a fairly creative use of WASD. There’s also a strange sense of a lack of agency and influence. While it is certainly you interacting with the environment and attempting to solve the puzzles, the linearity of it feels too transparent; you affect very little with your choice of dialogue and there’s a sense that nothing can go wrong. Back to the Future, in concept, involves a worried sense of urgency. The premise always revolves around a distinct lack of time with doom-laden deadlines looming on the very tangible temporal horizon, but there’s a very notable absence of this in the game. The result is a feeling of tethered reservation. The game seems afraid to challenge the player, which takes away a vital component of the translation from movie to game.

Nonetheless, this first episode had me entirely captivated and spontaneously smirking for the duration of its playtime. I’m interested to see the way in which the next four episodes swoop around in time and whether or not Telltale will inject a little more plutonium into proceedings.