Now this is a shiny meat bicycle

Its sense of humor started out a little weak - more dead-fish than slap-stick - but within the first hour or so, Tales from the Borderlands had me convinced. There may not be loot-based shooting, but this sure is a Borderlands game, with exploding psychos and everything.

Mechanically, nothing's really changed since The Wolf Among Us; there are dialog choices, brief atmospheric walking sections, and action sequences that use clicks or button-presses to attack and dodge. Tales is a little heavier on the action than on the walking -- at least so far, it doesn't seem to have any real analog to the investigations that were so crucial in Wolf.

Instead, Tales from the Borderlands focuses on the same madcap irreverence that made the Borderlands games so charmingly entertaining. (And it does so without requiring a good memory of what happened in Borderlands/2.) The dramatic story that it's telling almost seems snuck in, craftily attached to a humorous thrill-ride.

The voice acting is great, for the most part. In this first episode, I was able to pick out a few familiar voice actors, and they do a commendable job of delivering well-written, silly lines about Pandora's crazy garbage people. But the comedic timing does suffer from time to time, from what must be either poor voice direction or just issues in Telltale's notoriously shitty tech.

And the quality of animations is a little disappointing.

But despite these hiccups, I'm quite anxious to see the story through, and to find out what hijinks these crazy characters get up to next.

Progress: Finished episode 1, Zer0 Sum.