Android Blues posted:

I was enjoying the game up to now but this episode was sooooo baaaaad. I love Ramsay gallivanting around in the show, but the opening scene with him was just aggravatingly pointless. "Illusion of choice" is a bit dubious on its own, but throughout that scene there's not even an illusion of choice. The game almost taunts you with how manifestly nothing you say or do matters.

It also makes no sense - if you take the Glenmore soldiers with you to Highpoint, they're returning back with you to Ironrath without a gap in continuity. The whole thing is that they're garrisoned at Ironrath to act as your house guard - so what happened, did Arthur fall down a secret trapdoor while he was walking behind Rodrik a la Scooby Doo? They obviously wrote a scene for what happens if you left the Glenmores behind and then just shrugged and made it the resolution for the other choice too, a la Griff's miraculously healed eye.

In general I was kind of interested in how many choices the game seemed to let you make in the past couple of episodes re: the Forrester's plans, but all those loose ends got mopped up and ignored in this one. Combine that with the game presenting you false dilemmas about the show characters - the Tyrion and Ramsay scenes are just utterly devoid of tension because of this - and this was super inert, super disappointing, and enough to more or less kill my faith in Telltale.

I think it would be way better if they were just comfortable with letting the game diverge from canon. This doesn't need to line up perfectly with what happens in the show: demonstrate that early on, and let the player harm or kill Ramsay at a cost, let them actually screw things up for Tyrion or save his life, and suddenly you can use those show characters in an interesting way again.

Oh, jeez, not to even mention the traitor thing. It was Royland for me and he doesn't even explain his motivations, just yells incoherently at you for a while and makes vague allusions to "your CHOICES caused this. Eh? Eh? Choices!" that don't really hold water. There's a bit where he says, "I did it for what I believe in!" but it's totally unclear as to what he believes in and the script is more interested in having him bluster at you melodramatically than having him be a coherent character.

Terrible trash. Real bad. Super dull. At least Beshka is still in it.