Every once in a while I suffer from a bout of ennui and I just want to play something mindless and shooty but without too much gore or, well, trauma. I just want to tune out, to hear and have a consistent hum in my hands, to let the vibration of the controller and the world wash over me.
DESTINY used to fill that void for me until I realized? DESTINY? Kinda an asshole of a game. Sheer. Fucking. Exploitation. It’s all about the dopamine and nope, not going back to that spigot.
Instead, I trawled the deep dive of PS+ Extra and found TINY TINA’S WONDERLAND.
I admit: I’ve never been a huge BORDERLANDS fan, which is perhaps what developers Gearbox are best known for. (Well, that and a kinda botched HALO PC port.) I did enjoy the Telltale series TALES FROM THE BORDERLANDS, but the original FPS games felt too thin to me.
TINY TINA’S WONDERLANDS though? It hit the sweet spot for me.
I guess it’s BORDERLANDs adjacent? Aesthetically, sure? It’s all cel-shaded and broad strokes and pew-pew-pew!
What I love most about it though? It’s how it fucking nails the cavalier nature of being a dungeon master.
TINY TINA’S WONDERLAND (TINA from here-on-out) is ostensibly a meta-game, where the namesake Tina is forcing her friends to play a tabletop role-playing game and she’s having the time of her life while her friends? Well, Andy Samberg and Wanda Sykes are simply entertaining her.
(Yeah, I have no fucking clue as to how they wrangled such awesome voice actors for this game, but I’m not complaining! Oh, and Will Arnett is voicing the villain, as he does. Oh, and did I mention that Ashly Burch is the voice of Tina? As in Ashly Burch, the fucking voice of one of my favorite characters ever: Chloe in LIFE IS STRANGE? …yeah.)
Tina’s game goes way, way off the rails from the get-go, and I love to see it because while I’ve been playing tabletop role-playing games since my teens?
We have never, ever taken them seriously, despite the dungeon master’s most valiant attempts.
Every quest devolved into smiles and giggles and lunacy, and that same spirit is present in TINA because this game is wild and unapologetic and unhinged and sure, puerile at times, but it’s so much fun!
All of that said? Why. The. Fuck. Can Gearbox not ship the buggiest games ever?
It says a lot that I’m willing to play this game — this lampooning of Bethesda-ish role-playing games like SKYRIM — despite the fact that it’s buggier than Bethesda’s games, which are notoriously known for being buggy as shit!
Unlike any other game, I can’t go half an hour without it crashing on me. Also? It fucking overheats my PS5 to the point where the fucking console hard-crashes.
I literally have to unplug it to start it back up again.
Also? I’m playing it via the SSD! It should not be overheating!!
That is ridiculous. But I keep unplugging it and starting it back up again because that’s how much fun this game is.
(For what it’s worth, going completely offline — as in turning all online activity off via the PS5 settings — seemed to mitigate the issues, but that should not be the solution!)
I will note: the game does suffer from the normal bloat that I quickly realized BORDERLANDS does: there’s too much fucking loot. Micromanaging scores and prices and stats? It’s goddamn tiring! It’s overwhelming!
However, it’s a small price to pay for what is outlandish cotton candy-ish fun. It’s silly. It knows what it’s doing, and it knows how to make me laugh — even at some of the laziest jokes — and sometimes? Sometimes that’s all I need.
(I’ll note that I played this single-player, and I know that’s not in the spirit of the co-op friendliness of BORDERLANDS, but I’m not much of a co-op person!)