Backlog Bingo 2025: Tell Me Why

Tell Me Why is a 2020 episodic adventure game, sighs, "walking simulator", stops sighing, from Dontnod. Dontnod isn't exactly consistent, but between Life Is Strange and Jusant and this, they've definitely had a handful of indie darlings. (They also made Harmony: Fall of Reverie, which was on my 2024 card.)

This is the second of two games that was on my card at the order of my now-former Domme, the other being Exo One. (We are still dating, we're just in an egalitarian relationship now.) They said something after I'd finished it like "I hope it was okay that I had you play something heavy", and I laughed: they were also the reason that Before Your Eyes (a game that made me outright weep in the office of my old house) was on last year's bingo card; we are both just...kinda like this. Good art often hurts.

Tell Me Why tells the story of twin siblings Alyson and Tyler, returning to the house of their dead mom after many years, revisiting people who might know things about her death, figuring out what happened, trying to put the past to bed. Tyler confessed to her murder as a child, but of course, the reality of the situation is a lot more complicated than that. The twins' cop uncle was able to pull strings to get Tyler sent to a rehab program instead of to jail, and the game roughly begins with Alyson picking him up as he's discharged.

It's here that I should note that the primary thing that people know about this game, and the reason it ever comes up, is that Tyler is one of a vanishing few mainstream (a word I will use here despite an asterisk: Dontnod isn't unheard of, but this game was published by Microsoft) instances of transmasculine representation. He transitioned while in juvy, so a lot of revisiting his childhood home comes with the normal set of things that comes with for a trans person. The game handles him pretty masterfully, in my opinion: though the writing around him is a bit...unsubtle at times, I think this is forgivable, because what parses as on the nose to me ("okay no one would actually mention top surgery this many times in this short a time frame") is probably a necessary amount of heavy-handedness to clue in a random cishet person playing this.

Past this, though? It's unfortunately kinda hard to write about this game without just vomiting spoilers. I like the writing overall, and the game mostly does a good job of avoiding the Ammy Cardinal Sin of having conflict that amounts to "can the characters please just fucking talk" (though it does not 100% avoid this!) A couple of trans men I know really appreciate having good down-to-earth rep in a game. I enjoy that the reality of their mom's death is somehow even messier than the game originally hands out, but in very believable ways.

I just...liked this, yeah. The puzzles are kinda just There, but nothing is so hard as to overstay its welcome or start feeling bad. This is, as with many Dontnod and Telltale games, the sort of thing that I wish had just been a pure, sighs again, walking simulator, free of puzzles, just, walk from beat to beat to beat. But it isn't, and that's fine, even if the end result is "people complain about the weak gameplay" in a way that ironically likely wouldn't be true if there were less gameplay to be had.

But, hey, if you want a mechanically light 10-12 hour story about the complexities of identity and family and generational trauma? Play 1000xResist. (Gottem.) But when you're done playing 1000xResist, give this a shot too, you probably won't be disappointed.