You can complete these missions on your own time, in any order, which gives you an excuse to explore the town and revel in the experience of being inside the Stranger Things universe. The story is broken into chapters, each of which features a set of missions that roughly but faithfully follow the plots of various groups of characters from the show. At any given time, your party of two characters (the second of which is either controlled by AI or another player in local co-op) can roam free around familiar areas in and around a carefully pixelated version of Hawkins, Indiana. Since Stranger Things repurposes language and characters from Dungeons & Dragons, it's fitting that Stranger Things 3: The Game broadly mimics a 16-bit-era action RPG. Similarly, its structure and mechanics feel designed to remind you of "old games" generally without taking too heavily from any one, while also borrowing ideas from more modern games. While it sometimes seems scattershot, it all blends together surprisingly well, evoking the nostalgic warm-and-fuzzies you want from something designed to match Stranger Things' blanket "retro" vibe. Longer stretches of dialogue come in text boxes with so-so hand-drawn character portraits, evoking 8- and 16-bit era RPGs, but you'll also see a fair amount of floating pixelated flavor text a la Monkey Island. Though there is a uniform style, it's derived from a hodgepodge of influences. Ironically, it reminds me of a fake video game that might be made for a TV show: Its art style resembles 16-bit consoles, but is clearly more detailed than any SNES or Sega Genesis game could have been. ![]() There's an uncanny quality to Stranger Things 3: The Game's look. Stranger Things 3: The Game sticks close enough to the story of the show, but unsurprisingly lacks the same emotional punch. ![]() However, it does stick close enough to that script that I would strongly urge people to watch the new season before even turning it on. Though its roughly 8-hour campaign has more detail than you'd get watching a recap or reading a well-written wiki summary, it should surprise no one to hear that this version lacks the same emotional punch as the show. There's nearly nothing new.Without going into spoiler territory, the story in Stranger Things 3: The Game feels like an abridged version of the story told throughout season 3. If you've already watched the new season, it's very easy to get bored or exhausted playing this game because you know what's about to happen around every corner. The biggest moments are the same, the character interactions are the same, even most of the dialogue is a word-for-word carbon copy of the show. The plot of the game (excluding a couple of side missions) follows the plot of the new Stranger Things season step by step. The trouble with Stranger Things 3: The Game is that its purpose and story create a bit of a frustrating paradox. For the reasonable price of $19.99, that's everything you could ask for. It's pretty straightforward, and there's a lot of things for you to do. ![]() ![]() It's a game that knows exactly what it is, and does a great job of being just that. Stranger Things 3: The Game is an action RPG that lets you go on adventures with the characters from the series, solving puzzles throughout a pixelated Hawkins, Indiana and fighting off Russian goons and Upside Down creatures.
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