Telltale Games: Making Great Stories Frustrating

Greetings again my most humble and awesome readers. Today I want to talk about the video game developer known as Telltale games. They are known for their episodic story-based titles, which are usually attached to a license of some kind. Back to the Future, Batman, The Walking Dead, and so on. These games are played in the point and click style, and for that reason are not particularly accessible. But you see, myself and some folks like me really love story in games, which is something I’ve covered in blogs before. We love story so much that we will slog through these games regardless. Yeah, I know, we’re crazy. Let’s discuss that.

There are plenty of problems playing Telltale’s games. The most obvious is finding everything we’re supposed to click on and look at and interact with. This is very, very difficult. You can walk freely most times, but you can also move a cursor to click on things as well. So how do we get past this hurtle? Patience. Lots and lots of patience. I often play these games by frantically moving the cursor around with the right thumbstick and mashing the X button on PS4, or A button on Xbox. If I am successful, the character then autowalks to that location and interacts. This is interestingly the feature that makes me believe Telltale games could easily be made blind accessible. Regardless, we are helped slightly by the fact that, in the more recent games, you can only click on most things once. This at least means we don’t have to worry about repeatedly finding the same things over and over, though it’s still a tedious process.

Another problem, though, and some may consider this a more important problem, is dialog. Telltale’s games are heavily influenced by your dialog choices. While we can press buttons to make those choices, we have no actual idea which choice we’re making in advance. This is intensely frustrating, because as the story progresses, we just like anybody else, develop ideas of how we’d like to play the characters, but we cannot really execute those ideas. We must simply live with the choices we are not aware we’re making. Yeah, that’s a thing.

Third, we’ve got quicktime events! Certain moments in the story might require you to press the correct button at the right time to perform some important action. How do we get past these, you might ask? We guess! That’s right, we use trial and error to figure out every button, all the timing, and so on. Eventually, we can usually get through these that way, but it’s definitely not ideal. Dying over and over while just trying to pass a single portion of a game isn’t particularly fun either.

The point I’ve been trying to make with all this is that, as unfun as this can be, I’ve done it anyway. I have accepted that I won’t know which dialog choices I’m making, and that quicktime events are going to take forever. I understand that I’ll need lots of patience to find all the things in each room that I’ll need. Yet, I’ve done it anyway.I played both seasons of Telltale’s Batman like this, occasionally asking for sighted help with certain very specific parts of the game. I also played Tales from the Borderlands, which is a fun and hilarious game, like this as well. I did it because I still enjoy the stories these games tell, and I guess I don’t mind enjoying the story for the story, no matter how much longer that takes me than it would anyone else.

The other point, though, is that these games could easily be made accessible. I won’t go into detail on that here, as I’ve already written a blog which discusses the accessibility of point and click games, but it could be done. Unfortunatley, Telltale themselves have shown a lack of interest in accessibility, not just for the blind but for other types of disability as well. This is unfortunate, as they are capable of producing such great content, but for now it is what it is. It is my hope that one day, their minds change, and we all can enjoy the tales they tell equally. As always, thanks for reading, and continue to be awesome!

2 Comments

  1. SLJ says:

    I contacted the company last year, requesting them to make their games more accessible for blind people. I gave them a lot of examples on where I have trouble playing their games, and explained how they could be made more accessible. I got a nice reply telling that they might look into it in the future. But nothing has happened yet, so I have stopped supporting them, and don’t feel motivated to play their games anymore.
    I read in an article that the company has closed, but I don’t think that’s true, because their website doesn’t say anything about it.

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