Tails: The Backbone Preludes is a post-noir narrative adventure with branching choices. It is an intertwined series of vignettes about change, circumstance, and consequence. Keeping the style, mood and brilliance of the original Backbone game (which I’ve reviewed last year), this prequel is just as good as the initial one, giving some character background and allowing us to know them better.
The story is masterfully written, following four characters inside the Backbone universe, making them actually four separated short stories which don’t overlap or intertwine, and that’s because it all happens “later”, during the events of Backbone.
As a narrative and thematic prequel to Backbone, Tails: The Backbone Preludes introduces a plethora of new gameplay elements, interactions, and puzzles, as well as choices that affect each story from start to finish.
Guide four different characters through formative moments in their lives, all set to the backdrop of a gorgeously pixelized dystopian vision of Vancouver inhabited by anthropomorphic animals:
- Clarissa Bloodworth – A young girl willing to take her life in her own hands, facing the past of her family.
- Howard Lotor - A curious photography student making his way through university next to his roommate, Larry.
- Renee Wilson - A compassionate journalist trying to balance her work and love life and to make a difference in the world.
- Eli Abbas - A researcher outside the city walls on the verge of a world-changing discovery.
The gameplay is simple, relaxed and the game takes only like 4-5 hours on a very relaxed play, so it’s a very quick play. Once you finish the game, you can start a New Game+ and restart the adventure in order to change some things, although your options are fairly limited and don’t have a huge impact on the outcome. As far as I’ve read, there are several endings, but after reading them, I don’t think I’ll actively pursue them, as the outcome is largely the same, only with minor differences.
One last thing worth mentioning is one of the initial game’s strengths, the music, which does a very good job at setting up the mood and making the entire thing just feel great to play.
Get it: EggNut
Spoilers!
