TLDR: Well executed, but good thing it was free. Probably won’t play again.

When I ran out of Episode 5 of The Long Dark on stream I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I’d set aside 2 hours on a Wednesday night for this and I didn’t want to go back to just getting a good night’s sleep and a screen break!

So I decided to try all of the free games I’ve been getting from the Epic store; a piece of software I only have an account on because I was promised a new Unreal Tournament was in the works. I tried the demo; it’s quite good; it’s probably not going to be finished. I think that, as a society, we can start to move on from this injustice.

So it was that on November 12th, 2021, I rolled the virtual die and was instructed by the arbitrary laws of the universe to play Stranger Things III: The Game.

Each week on a Wednesday we will be giving another game 2 hours to sink or swim; and then we write about it.

Stranger Things 3: The Game

Most of these games I’ve seen little about besides the videos on the store page that made me install it in the first place. This one, I saw the name, and wondered what sort of game could be affiliated with the eponymous hit TV show.

Jumping in with both feet I was pleasantly surprised to see an isometric video game with low-res graphics that has actually gone to the effort of trying to mimic games of the early 90s Sega Megadrive era. It wears the style on its sleeve, playing heavily into the absurdity of those games: your starting characters are able to swing a baseball bat and fire a catapult with startling effect, and nobody bats an eye as two young hoodlums run rampant in the mall, destroying handbags and ice creams in this fashion in order to find the goodies inside.

Yes, like all games from the nineties, coins can be found in ice creams.

Fans of the TV series will vaguely recognise the plot of the game through dialogue and quests, delivered piecemeal among minor callbacks to the show and completely outlandish and irrelevant scenarios. Remember when Will and Lucas helped out that shop owner who had been foreclosed on by beating up mutated rats and Russians in order to find five personal items for said owner? No, nor I.

Were it not for the fact this style of gameplay and this aesthetic work hand-in-hand, the whole game would be a wreck of mismatched fights and puzzles with a plot that seems irrelevant. Quick-time hacking games, brawling fights with hostile Russians, and bizzarely underexplained puzzles all held together by a story already told in another medium would make no sense whatsoever in a modern game in a modern style, but are entirely forgiven when presented as if contemporary with such spin-off games like Toy Story and Aladdin, and gratuitously reckless games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.

As it is, the two-hour session allocated to every game in this series became a three-hour game, three hours of “This is awful, why am I still playing?"—perhaps the most telling feature of this session. It was a genuine opinion at the time: the game was terrible, but this retro, ridiculous sort of terrible that commanded my attention and drew me into playing more.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine paying for this game, and I can’t say I’m likely to play it some more in my off time. The game has the air of one that was going to be made anyway, and was given the funding to bring it to completion at the cost of turning it into a tie-in game with an imported plot peppered throughout it like a seasoning. As much as I have an affinity for vandalising public property in case it has money in it, I find myself wishing that it had been an indie game carrying its own charm with its own absurd plot, instead of using someone else’s.

Now, I have no reason to believe that this was the case, especially since it is the third in the series: I’m sure that the game was commissioned in this manner from the outset, and from that perspective the execution is excellent. The retro style is well-crafted, with attention paid to the details of what made games of the era what they were (i.e. games: not trying for realism, and telling the story in their own way), right down to the pixel graphics that align themselves to the low-res grid where other games will be clearly full-res sprites with big pixels, layered haphazardly.

In all the game was well executed and probably quite replayable, but the Stranger Things bent just doesn’t do anything except to remind me that I watched the series, and ping me the occasional dopamine spike when I recognise a reference.