Nukezilla Review: Back to the Future: The Game – Episode 4: Double Visions (PC)

Warning: Here There Be Spoilers

Yeah, yeah. I know. This should have been up ages ago. Blame anyone who isn’t me.

When we last left young Marty, he was stuck in an alternate 1986 in which Doc — now known as Citizen Brown — along with his wife Edna Strickland, rule the citizens of Hill Valley with a strong moral code. To break enough rules is to be subjected to the mind-washing program known as the Citizen Plus program.

Cut to Episode 4: Double Visions, where Marty and Citizen Brown try to escape the alternate Hill Valley in order to rebuild the DeLorean from Doc Brown’s old schematics… but first, they need to escape the underground Citizen Plus program. Upon later contemplation, Citizen Brown and Marty realize they need to break up the budding romance between 1931′s Doc Brown and queen of proper etiquette, Edna Strickland, and instead steer young Emmett to the local movie theater to see Frankenstein, so he can be inspired to devote his life to science, thus setting the time stream back to normal again.

Most of my original problems with the series are still present; big surprise. The episode is too short (though I will admit this one took a bit longer than previous episodes; there’s a bit of padding in the form of a lengthy puzzle), the graphic glitches are still present, and the puzzles are still really easy. This hasn’t changed. But a few other things have.

Let’s start with the in-game puzzles. I was surprised to see that some of the puzzles were actually more involved than any we’d seen prior to Double Visions. While hardly brain busters, a few of the puzzles required a bit more tinkering than I’d grown accustomed to for the series. Sure, at the end of the day these were little more than Three Trials-like tasks, but the puzzles that take you through the trials are longer and a little more involved, which for me is a step in the right direction for the series, late in the game though it may be.

The most important — and, for me, welcome — changes in the series are the story and the character development. The darker tone established in Citizen Brown is still present, though not very prominent until the final act of the episode. That the story continues this tone after our heroes’ departure from the alternate 1986 is an interesting (and, honestly, much needed) move. While having a more serious tone is fantastic, however, for me nothing in this episode (or series, even) can top the character development that’s gone on in Double Visions.

More specifically, what’s going on with Citizen Brown. In Citizen Brown, the character was the villain because he didn’t know any other way to be; the circumstances surrounding alternate Hill Valley and his freakishly controlling wife Edna put him in that position with little hope of breaking out. However, we saw the “Doc” of him underneath the surface, and ultimately Marty was able to draw that out and steal Citizen Brown away with a little convincing. That’s been thrown completely by the wayside for this episode, with Citizen Brown’s surprising conscious decision to become the villain.

Yeah. You heard me. Doc’s a proper villain, now.

Ben and I talked a bit about this on our podcast, about Citizen Brown effectively replacing Doc in the games (and it doesn’t help that Marty constantly calls him Doc, at Citizen Brown’s own insistence). Telltale Games has made a risky move pitting Marty and Doc against each other for such an extended period of time…and I love it. I’m probably going to get some angry readers disagreeing with me, but Citizen Brown and Marty are at odds for all the right reasons. It’s left a delicious opening of possibilities for Episode 5, and I can only hope that Telltale Games will follow through.

It seems almost anticlimactic to bring this up now, but I must say I was delightfully surprised by parts in the story when Citizen Brown brings up the ethics of screwing around with the timeline — more specifically, grilling Marty on why he has the right to destroy entire alternate timelines just to restore his own. It’s something that was only briefly touched upon in the movies — and I’m sure we’d all agree that Biff’s 1986 is better off gone — but it makes a fan sit back and think about how many (potential) lives Marty (and while we’re at it, Doc Brown) has destroyed while traipsing through time. There is, therefore, plenty of foreshadowing for tomorrow’s final episode, and hopefully Telltale Games will take advantage of this intrigue and development they’ve suddenly built this late into the series and do something with it. The pressure is on, and hopefully the developers will do nothing but deliver.

As Marty would say, “This is heavy.”

Disclosure: We were provided with a free copy of the game by Telltale Games.