Tell Me Why is full of plenty of choices but the situations rarely made me feel conflicted and the consequences weren’t severe enough to make me feel invested. It’s not ideal for a story that wants to provide commentary on such issues.
I expected Tell Me Why to further pull back the curtain on Mary-Ann’s mental health issues but they’re never explored in any real depth.Īs far as other explorations of mental health, there’s a depiction of a panic attack and therapy is addressed, but it ultimately all feels underexplored, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps ourselves. However, we also know she was obviously troubled. She certainly isn’t portrayed as a stereotypical abusive mom: Mary-Ann handcrafted all her kids’ toys and sewed their clothes (as money was tight), she read them bedtime stories, she took them on vacation, and by everyone’s accounts, she loved them. Their desperate need to give their twisted tale some sense is understandable, but the search feels unfulling because nothing can unring that bell and there’s no answer that could provide comfort in such a dark scenario. I imagine that’s what the twins are experiencing as they continuously confront the violence that led to their mother’s demise. It feels almost impossible to process and move past something you cannot explain. That the killing took place is never in doubt, but the driving conflict of Tell Me Why quickly becomes figuring out what drove a mother to threaten to murder one of her own children. Spoiler alert for the first moments of the story: Upon starting Tell Me Why, you immediately see a flashback that reveals how one twin killed their mom in self-defense. The selection process quickly turned into a mundane task I had to do rather than a compelling way to twist the twins’ fates.
While some characters may protest when confronted with your memory-based evidence, there’s no way to really know “the truth.” This ties in thematically with the idea of truth not being an indisputable sequence of events, but the lack of pressure I felt as a player made my internal debate a bit dull and low-stakes. That said, it doesn’t really matter which perspective you go with.
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