Tell Me Why

Twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan return to their childhood home in fictional Delos Crossing, Alaska, ten years after a tragedy tore their family apart, sharing a private telepathic connection that lets them relive fragments of a past neither fully remembers the same way. DONTNOD built its reputation on Life is Strange's blend of teenage drama and supernatural mystery, and Tell Me Why applies that same formula to an adult, more grounded story. The review sample treats the game's craft and its writing as two genuinely separate conversations, and it's worth keeping them separate here too.

What the studio still does well, in detail

Presentation is where almost everyone agrees. Delos Crossing's small-town Alaskan setting draws specific, repeated praise for its art direction, with more than one reviewer saying the environments made them want to visit the real place the fiction is modeled on. Voice acting and music hold up to DONTNOD's established standard, and the central hook — two people who share literal access to the same childhood memories, and don't always agree on what actually happened in them — is described by multiple reviewers as genuinely compelling, particularly across the first chapter before pacing concerns set in.

Where fans of the studio's earlier work push back

The substantive criticism is specific rather than a vague letdown. Reviewers who name Life is Strange as a favorite describe Tell Me Why's writing and characters as a clear step down, several calling the protagonists flat or unlikeable in ways that undercut a story asking players to deeply invest in their relationship. Player choice draws its own detailed complaint: multiple reviewers directly compare the branching structure to Life is Strange's and conclude this game's choices carry noticeably less real narrative weight, describing the sensation as illusory agency rather than functional divergence — the same "choices matter" gap this list has documented in other 2020 releases, here applied to a studio whose reputation was partly built on getting that mechanic right. Pacing draws sustained, specific criticism too, with reviewers describing stretches genuinely boring enough that one detailed account subtracts real playtime lost to disengagement from their total completion time.

A related, more mechanical complaint concerns how little the moment-to-moment gameplay actually asks of players: several reviewers describe walking, object inspection and narrated exposition as accounting for the overwhelming majority of playtime, with few systems layered on top even by the standards of a genre that's already lightweight on mechanics. None of this reads as a uniquely political complaint — it's the same kind of craft critique any narrative adventure could draw, made specific and repeated enough across the review sample to take seriously as the central substantive weakness.

The separate, political dimension worth naming plainly

Distinct from that craft critique, multiple reviewers independently report that a real portion of the game's negative reviews, particularly around launch, were driven by backlash against its transgender protagonist — voiced by a transgender actor, one of the first instances of that casting choice in a major Xbox-published release — rather than by the story or mechanics themselves. This review treats that political backlash as a separate, factual observation about the review record rather than blending it into the substantive quality debate above; a reader weighing whether to try the game deserves to know both that real, detailed craft criticism exists and that a real, documented political dimension exists alongside it, without either one being used to dismiss the other.

How far players actually get

Global achievement data shows a gradual, non-catastrophic taper rather than a sharp wall: over three-quarters of players clear the earliest story milestone, dropping into the thirties and forties for mid-story goals and single digits for the rarest completionist achievements. That shape is consistent with the pacing complaints above — a real, if not universal, share of players lose momentum as the story goes on rather than being blocked by any difficulty, since the game has none in the traditional sense. It also confirms the first chapter's stronger reception translates into more people actually finishing it than continuing all the way through the full three-chapter arc.

An episodic release built for a subscription-era audience

Tell Me Why launched across three chapters released roughly two weeks apart in August-September 2020, a structure DONTNOD carried over from Life is Strange's own episodic history. Reviewers playing after all three chapters were already available generally experience it as a single continuous story rather than the wait-driven event the original release format created, which may partly explain why the pacing complaints read more sharply in retrospect — a slow midsection is more noticeable played back-to-back than spread across separate release weeks with time to reflect between them. That's a structural detail worth knowing rather than a flaw in either direction, since it shapes how the same content lands depending on when a player experiences it.

Verdict

Tell Me Why looks and sounds like DONTNOD at its best while reading, by wide agreement among the studio's own longtime fans, as one of its weaker scripts — flatter characters, choices with less real weight, and pacing that tests patience more than Life is Strange ever did. Because it costs absolutely nothing to try, the honest recommendation here is genuinely simple: it's worth trying for the mystery and the setting alone, with expectations calibrated to a gentler, more linear, more movie-like experience than the comparison to the studio's biggest hit tends to imply going in.