Clickbait intro: Game so bad it makes notorious diehard videogame preservationist pray that it's lost to the sands of time.

You know, I had about 1400~ words of an incomplete real review typed up for this one, but I tabbed back in to keep playing and just.

Man.

I try to be fair to the games I play, even if they're ass. I like to sit with them, ponder them on my morning walks, look into their creation. I believe that all art contains a variable amount of love and that love should be, if not appreciated, at least acknowledged. I think games are art, and my desire to treat them the same way I've treated music for decades is what made me create this Backloggd account in the first place.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands makes me wish I reneged on that personal promise.

It's difficult to describe this term using language, because the game just feels like pure hate. So much of it is steeped in contempt for someone or something that it actually borders on staggering.

If you care enough about videogames to even use Backloggd you probably already know about Borderlands Humor so I'm not gonna devote a mini essay to it. I'm also not gonna pretend I never liked Borderlands; up until around 2018 Borderlands 2 was a game I'd replay yearly.

Borderlands humor now grates on me in my old age, but the jokes at least have setup and punchlines even if those punchlines are of debatable... everything.

Wonderlands' jokes confound me, because oftentimes the punchline is "a thing exists". It has all the same energy of your debatably conservative uncle nudging you with his elbow at a wedding party and saying "Polish people, right?" except it's some quip about tabletop game/player stereotypes that the writer found by going on Tumblr and sifting through the TTRPG tags.
At least 95% of the dialogue in this game is jokes like this, or orphaned punchlines that feel as though they're responding to a nonexistent setup.
The other 5% is... Dated. Borderlands humor gets even more dated as each entry comes out and betrays the sad, unmoving time capsule that the directors live in, but Wonderlands is somehow worse than the prior entry because it feels like it came fresh out of 2012. I only played Portal 2 a month or so ago and this game could've been its contemporary.

I know riffing on a Gearbox title for not being funny is a bit redundant, it's like riffing on Gears of War for having cover or riffing on Skyrim for having dragon shouts or riffing on Halo for having Spartans or riffing on Baldur's Gate 3 for being bad. But I dunno, this game came out in 2022 and it's somehow a step backwards from everything before it. It boggles the mind. Even as I type this I find myself endlessly confused, wondering who they used as focus testers that anything in this game writing-wise got approval.

I think the sticking point for me is that this game is very ostensibly a parody of tabletop games and tabletop gamers, but there's a bit too much venom for me to really call it a parody. Many of the TTRPG related jokes feel mean-spirited and cheap, not unlike the Saints Row reboot. These don't feel like jokes for tabletop players, they feel like jokes about tabletop players.
The ones that aren't mean feel very... "How do you do, fellow kids?", to the point where even calling them "Reddit-like" is inaccurate

The spiel about games and love up above wasn't just a fillerbuster, it's something I genuinely have been pondering this entire time.

Wonderlands doesn't feel like it was made with any love.

I question who or what the target audience for this game looks like because just from observing the text, I get the feeling it just fucking hates everybody? It clearly has no love for tabletop players given both them and their hobby are the butt of the joke, it has no love for Borderlands players either because its parent series is barely present and is only wheeled out to keep the player awake, and it clearly has no love for sensible people because it forces you to listen to Ashly Burch's ulcer-bustingly racist Tiny Tina voice for a full game's runtime.

What really confounds me is just how desperate the game is, though.

In 2013, they already did this game. It was a DLC for Borderlands 2 titled "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" and it was... Okay, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of BL2's DLC for numerous reasons, but it was this game down a T except with like... Not even better writing, it had writing to begin with.
I harp on the jokes so much because that's basically all this game has, besides Will Arnett phoning in a performance to get a paycheck now that the Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman mines dried up.
There's a story which, prior to playing the game, I'd seen hyped up as "Better than BL3's". After playing it, I wondered if I'd bought a secret copy that lacked any plot, because there basically isn't on.

Wonderlands does have gameplay which, as is the running theme here, is just BL3's but infinitely worse. God I miss Moze. What were they even cooking here? Were BL fans begging for less interesting gameplay?

All in all, I am struggling to come up with a meaningful conclusion here, or even say anything nice. Saying "it's just bad" is boring, and something any goblin with a keyboard can tell you over in the Steam reviews, but... It's just bad, dude. I got this game for £12 and I'm genuinely regretting not using it to get a nice haul from Greggs. A pack of sausage rolls for the fridge, a Mexican chicken oval bite for the evening and a packet of their spicy chicken bites for lunch... Mmm.

Some people, usually Bloodborne fans for some reason, will tell you that they wish they could wipe their memory and play a game for the first time all over again.

I wish I could wipe this game from my memory.

Which, given the next Honkai Star Rail update is all about memory, sure does feel prophetic.