New Tales from the Borderlands details spill out of SXSW

New details have emerged about Telltale's episodic adventure game set in the gunny, gunny world of Borderlands. We already knew a few scant things about the upcoming series, plucked from its reveal late last year, and now we know a little more, thanks to a recent Tales from the Borderlands panel at the SXSW gaming expo. Things like: it will have a lighter, more comedic tone to it than Telltale's other recent series, it will feature two central characters each with their own special abilities, and its story has something in common with the (surprisingly Deppless) Tim Burton film Big Fish.

You won't be too surprised to hear that Tales from the Borderlands will take place on Pandora - that's Pandora from the Borderlands series, and not the Ferngully Smurfs one from Avatar. Unlike the main shooty series, you won't be playing as a do-goody hero but rather a couple of greedy, self-serving types by the name of Fiona and Rhys. Fiona is a con artist, while Rhys is a Hyperion employee with a robotic arm. You'll be able to use their respective smooth talking and robot hacking arm skills at various points in the game.

More interesting is the little wrinkle that the story is going to contain, well, a lot of bullshit. By that I mean that it's being narrated from the future by Rhys and Fiona themselves, who seem like the sort of people to talk up their accomplishments, to paint themselves in a particularly glorious light.

"You never really play what actually happened, you're playing this Big Fish version of what happened," Kevin Bruner of Telltale explained at the panel, as witnessed by the fine folks at Polygon .

Head over to that link for more details about the upcoming series, including some interesting discussion about its more lighthearted tone. Well, things can't really get much darker than The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Game of Thrones. At least, I hope not.

Thanks, Polygon.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.