Tell Me Why's first chapter is now free

Tell Me Why didn't quite set our hearts on fire as much as Dontnod's critically lauded Life Is Strange. But if you're still looking for a bit of small-town supernatural antics, the first part of the trilogy is now permanently free to download.

Yesterday, developer Dontnod announced that Chapter 1 of Tell Me Why has been made completely free. As a bonus, if you enjoyed your time with it, the rest of the series is 50% off on Steam and the Windows Store until Friday.

Tell Me Why looked promising, setting up a genuine coming-of-age story about family and gender identity. But as Sam Greer found in her review, the later acts squander this set-up with a return to Dontnod's more fantastical elements. Sadly, it seems the game never quite managed to balance these two halves.

"By the end, the game stopped asking me to engage with two believable humans and instead insisted I care about a fantastical, predictable foe. Videogames are so often about the latter that Tell Me Why's abandonment of the former feels like a real crying shame."

20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.