Telltale is responsible for some truly amazing narrative-driven games on the App Store. Walking Dead: The Game (Free) was a major turning point for them, my personal favorite of theirs is Tales From the Borderlands (Free), but it seems like Minecraft: Story Mode (Free) is what really put them on the mainstream map. If you haven’t played any of them, they’re basically in the style of choose your own adventure books where you’re making decisions that drive the story forward and that story is told through what effectively amounts to a chain of animated cut scenes. They play a bit like old school LaserDisc games, which makes today’s news fairly amusing as it feels like we’re coming full circle on that ancient technology as Telltale’s adventure game catalog heads to Netflix, with Minecraft: Story Mode being the first game to be released on the platform.
Per a report from TechRadar, Telltale games will join Netflix’s existing interactive titles like Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale (which apparently have been very popular). What I’m super curious of is how much is going to be stripped from these games to make them work on Netflix. The existing interactive movies on Netflix basically just play different videos depending on what selections you make with the remote. Presumably the segments of Telltale games where you’re walking around will need to go, or be simplified, as will the quick time events.
This might sound bad, but I’d go as far as to say some of these games might even be improved by removing these things. I’ve always thought the quick time events were sort of annoying, and rapidly tapping the screen ad various intervals never really added too much to my immersion versus just experiencing the larger story. We’ll see how this all pans out, but (eventually) having access to a huge array of Telltale games just as part of your existing Netflix subscription seems pretty awesome.
[via TechRadar]
