Tell Me Why: Chapters 1-3

Tell Me Why is DONTNOD’s follow-up to Life is Strange, and it swaps that series’ small-town American drama for a similarly quiet, similarly heavy story set in Alaska. Twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan return to their childhood home years after being separated, and the game asks you to help them piece together what actually happened during a rough upbringing by revisiting their memories, which don’t always match. That gap between what each twin remembers is the whole engine of the mystery, and it’s a genuinely different hook than most narrative adventures lean on.

How it plays

This isn’t a game about reflexes or combat. You walk through detailed environments, talk to people, and use the twins’ unusual psychic connection to step into memories from their past, sometimes with each sibling recalling the same event differently. Conversations carry weight because your choices shape how close Tyler and Alyson stay as the story moves forward, and those choices ripple into later scenes rather than resetting cleanly. Alongside the memory work, there are puzzles tied to a shared fantasy world the twins invented as kids, which gives the story a little breathing room between its heavier emotional beats. It’s slow, deliberate, and built for people who want to read a room and make a call, not react to a timer.

Who it’s for

If you liked Life is Strange, or you generally gravitate toward story-first games where dialogue choices matter more than mechanical skill, this is squarely in your lane. It also rewards patience with mature, sensitive subject matter and small-town character writing, since DONTNOD clearly wanted the setting and the people in it to feel lived-in rather than decorative. On the other hand, if you need combat, exploration for its own sake, or a faster pace, you’re going to find the pacing here frustrating. This is a walk-and-talk game through and through, and there’s no way to dress that up as something else.

Is it worth grabbing?

For a free claim, yes, easily. Narrative adventures like this tend to hold up well over time since there’s no multiplayer scene to die out and no mechanical systems to feel dated, so grabbing it now and playing it whenever you’re in the mood for something contemplative is a low-risk move. It’s especially worth it if you’ve already burned through the Life is Strange games and want more of that same reflective, choice-driven storytelling from the same studio. Just go in knowing it’s a slower, more personal kind of game, best played when you actually have the attention to spare for it rather than as background noise.

Quick facts

Genre: Action & adventure. Developer: DONTNOD Entertainment. Publisher: Xbox Game Studios. Platform: PC. Released: August 27, 2020.