Dying is easy, comedy is hard, and a whole lot of both goes on in Tales from the Borderlands. But as difficult as comedy can be, Tales from the Borderlands pulls it off without breaking a sweat. Staying consistently funny for ten-plus hours, maintaining an engaging story, and being enjoyable to play is about as easy as juggling flaming chainsaws, but Tales from the Borderlands pulls it off with as much grace (and as many explosions) as you couജld possibly hope for. Basically, it's brilliant, and it's what other comedy games should want to be when they grow up.

Set after the events of Borderlands 2 and starring two wildly different protagonists - cybernetically-enhanced dork Rhys, and fast-talking conwoman Fiona - Tales from the Borderlands is all about a crew of misfits and the wacky hijinks they get up to in their quest to hunt down the Vault key that will lead them to i🔯ncredible riches. Complications naturally arise, and they find themselves getting involved with gang warfare, long-dead corporations, betrayal, revenge, and one very unfortunate use of a spork. Rhys and Fiona share storytelling duties, each describing how things went from their particular perspective, exaggerating here and embellishing there so that they always end up looking clever, heroic, and daring.

That leads to some hilarious back-and-forth when one calls the other out on their skewed version of events, like when Rhys claims to have sealed a business deal in a hyper-violent way and Fiona reveals that he did a lot less killing and a lot more begging and crying. While that happens quite a bit in the game's opening episodes, the tone of their alternating narratives shifts later on, with Rhys filling in blind spots in Fiona's version of events, and vice versa. It’s a creative approach to the rivals-ending-u❀p-as-allies trope, allowing them the chance to transform into genuinely charming and likable characters along their journey. The supporting cast, especially Loaderbot, Vasquez, and Sasha, are equally memorable and round out the action with delightful dialog and antics.

All of these folks working together serve to elevate the two things Tales wants to highlight most: action and comedy. Being able to go anywhere and do anything with the storyꦫ lets the developers get extremely creative with the game's scenes of mayhem (forcing the protagonists into makeshift death derbies, launching a travel trailer into orbit, building an entire sequence riffing on a cartoon from the 80s), which are perfectly executed and extremely fun to go blazing through. In term🐷s of controls you might be limited to swiping left and right with some button-mashing thrown in, in keeping with Telltale's standard model for episodic interaction. Still, the action is so colorfully and ridiculously realized that unless you have an abiding issue with the format, you probably won't notice.

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